| Everyday people are confronted with complex information, some are usefull, while others may be not. In order to more efficiently study and work, people need to concentrate their attention on meaningful information while ignoring the disturbance of meaningless information. Therefore, investigating the production, evolution and brain mechanisms underlying the conflict processing using psychological method makes great sense to one’s well being.In the field of psychology, conflict is divided into cognitive conflict and emotional conflict according to the classes of the information. When the information belongs to emotional (cognitive) one, we call this kind of conflict as emotional (cognitive) conflict.The research schema of emotional conflict also evolves from the one of cognitive conflict. For example, the emotional face-word task corresponds to the classical Stroop task, the emotional Flanker task corresponds directly to the cognitive Flanker task. The face-word task is more efficient tool in researching emotional conflict effect and thus is most popular.Previous functional magnet resonance imaging studies suggested that prefrontal cortex and limbic system were involved in emotional conflict. Specificly, some researcher found that dorsal anterior cingulate cortex contributes to the monitoring of emotional conflict, rostral anterior cingulate cortex resolves emotional conflict, the functional pathway between rostral anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala is the key circuit mediating the resolution of emotional conflict. However, some other researcher found this mechanism only exists in high anxiety participants. Therefore, there still exist debates about the exact mechanisms of emotional conflict. On the one hand, the research method differs from study to study. On the other hand, they all shared some drawbacks. First, the sample is very small, which may suffer from low statistical power and thus missed some possibly interesting findings. Second, the studies only consider brain function, further morphologic study may help clarify the debate. Even though there were studies devoting to the mechanism of brain dynamics underling emotional conflict resolution of psychiatric ones, few studies research into that of the old people. Research about the brain of the old people can not only help us get a deep understanding of the theoretical model but also help us revise the model. Of course, the findings can also promote the late life of aging people.Present study will use functional magnet resonance imaging technique to probe the cognitive neuroscience of emotional conflict resolution. The first study focused on the morphologic underlying the emotional conflict effect using single-factor design (incongruent condition versus congruent condition).190 participants completed the face-word task and magnet resonance imaging scan. Using voxel-based morphometry analysis, we found the regional grey matter density of a wide spread regions significantly covaried with emotional conflict effect. The second study had a group of old people and demographic mateched control complete the face-word task while undergoing magnet resonance scanning. We found that the old people featured a hyper-activity in medial prefrontal network contrast of incongruent condition minus congruent condition. The meaning of the findings was discussed in detail. The two studies may help shed lights on the neural mechanism of the emotional conflict effect. |
