The Effect Of Emotion On Conflict Adaptation

When our brain have experienced an conflict task during cognitive control processes, the brain can better resolve these conflicts if subsequently encountered a similar conflict task, this effect is called congruency sequential effect (CSE) or conflict adaptation effect. In other words, based on previous experience, the brain can be optimized to solve current problems. In life, people are often experienced happy or negative emotions, such as anxiety or fear, at this time, what will be affected for conflict adaptation effect, and, the important significance for people to adapt to complex social environment to maintain physical and mental health, emotional words, music, awards and emotional pictures is usually used to induce emotional background in research. Flanker task, Simon task and Stroop task and the variants of these tasks which are used to research conflict task.Recent studies have found that the emotion can affect conflict-driven executive control. It has been found that emotion can promote or inhibition conflict adaptation effect in the conflict resolution process. Some studies suggested that negative moods increased conflict adaptation effects. Hower, some other found that task-irrelevant negative stimuli significantly reduced conflict adaptation compared to neutral images. Some researches suggested that when an emotional stimulus is task relevant, more resources may be devoted to conflict processing to reduce the time that an organism is unable to act, therefore processing of conflict is facilitated by emotion. However, other researchers proposed a dual competition model, which attempts to explain the interaction between emotion and executive function in terms of shared processing resources. They suggested that task performance is typically impaired in the presence of a task-irrelevant emotional stimulus because resources needed for the primary task are utilized, at least in part, toward the processing of the emotion-laden stimulus, therefore negative stimuli significantly reduced conflict adaptation. Recently, some researcheres suggested that the exact role that emotion plays in a task is crucial for determining its impact. Emotion will only enhance cognitive control if the behaviorally relevant stimuli that participants react to during a task are emotional, and when emotion stimuli were unrelated to the task, conflict resolution is impaired.Hower, current research on how emotion affect conflict adaptation is focused on the level of behavior, there is fewer studies on neural activity in time and space. And, the current studies focus on negative emotions, how positive emotions affect conflict adaptation effect is fewer.In experiment1, We recorded ERPs in20volunteers took part in the experiment. Participants performed a letter flanker task. A neutral or negative image was shown between trials, to study the neural activity in time and space. In task, the ratio between congruency and incongruency was fifty percent and in pseudo-random rank. Combined with event-related potentials technique, to explore its neural activity at the time and spatial, In tasks consistent and inconsistent trials were50-50percent, In order to rule out repetition priming effect, we using a pseudo-random order. The indicators include response time, error rates and electrophysiological (N450and LPC). The results showed that:Behavioral data confirmed that there was a significant interaction between emotion and conflict adaptation. Follow-up analyses showed that there was a significant conflict adaptation effect in response times in neutral condition, and conflict adaptation effect was disappeared for negative condition. ERP waveform analysis revealed that there was an obvious N450component around380-450ms. The analysis of the avarege amplitude show that there was a larger N450amplitude in negative condition than amplitude in neutral condition. Then, we found there was an LPC around490～690ms. The analysis of the avarege amplitude found that there was a significant interaction between emotion and conflict adaptation effect. Follow-up analyses showed that there was a significant conflict adaptation effect in neutral condition, but conflict adaptation effect in negative condition was disappeared. And, LPC amplitude was larger in neutral condition than amplitude in negative condition,In experiment2, A neutral or positive image was shown between trials between flanker task to explore how positive affect conflict adaptation effect. The results shown that:In neutral condition, there is no conflict adaptation effect, but, In positive condition, It is a significant conflict adaptation effect. Which indicate that positive emotions can contribute to conflict adaptation compared with neutral conditions.we found that conflict adaptation effects was affected by emoton and the effect is related to emotional value. Compared with neutral conditions, Negative emotion impairs conflict-driven executive control, but, In positive condition, positive emotions can contribute to conflict adaptation effect. In experiment1, we founed this effect is relate to conflict detection and conflict resolution. The relevant brain regions are the prefrontal cortex and temporal-parietal cortex. Conflict adaptation effect is promoted by positive emotion, making the conflict adaptation effect becomes more stably. In conclusion, the experimental results shown that emotion process is need to consume some resources, thus, making the reaction time of the conflict resolution becomes longer, hower, in the conflict-induced adjustment which exhibited difference effect on the valence..