Preliminary Study On The Automatic Processing Of Auditory Information Under The Visual Emotion Background

Purpose: To evaluate the exogenous responses(P1, N1, P2 components) and the endogenous responses(deviant MMN, novel MMN and P3a) during viewing the different types of video clips. Additionally, six frequency bands by spectrum analysis were also measured as indices to distinguish processing of auditory tones affected by visual negative events from neutral events. Moreover, intention was to reflect the continued effect induced by visual negative related context which was presented difference between men and women.Method: A cross-modal three stimulus Oddball paradigm was used in the present study. Male subjects(n=24) and female subjects(n=24) were instructed to view the different types of videos carefully and ignore auditory stimuli. At the end of each video, the participants were required an assessment of arousal and valence values. And the responses to the three different auditory stimuli presented by headphones were recorded as ERP results.Results: In the study of main emition(1) the event-related potentials(ERPs) results showed that the novel MMN and P3 a were smaller for negative than for neutral condition in females.(2) Meanwhile, the results of gender effect furtherly showed the difference wave of novel MMN and P3 a amplitude was smaller for females than for males in the negative-minus-neutral condition.(3) Spectral power results displayed higher power in gamma band for males compared with females in negative condition.In the study of buffer emotion(1) deviant MMN for after negative condition was smaller than the ones for before negative condition in females.(2) Also we found deviant MMN was smaller for females than for males both in the after negative buffer condition and in after-minus-before negative buffer condition.Conclusions: These above data demonstrated that(1) neural automatic process of change detection and subsequent involuntary attentional orientation for females were inhibited when the negative viewing was presented,(2) the inhibitory effect of sadness lasted longer for females, however, males had advantage of regulating the negative emotion.