The Effect Of Valence And Awakening On Emotional Conflict And Its Gender Differences

Emotional conflict is a complicated emotional psychological phenomenon, it is one of the hot issues of emotional and cognitive research. Emotional conflict developed on the basis of research on cognitive conflict. Emotional conflict is closely related with cognition, so more and more research focused on the cognitive processing of conflicting emotional information when individuals facing emotional conflict. In our essay, emotional conflict refers to the interference of unrelated emotional stimulus to the current target tasks, for example, by writing a red word "fear" on the center of a pleasant expression, the inconsistent emotional valence or type is formed between the word and the face, and the conflict will significantly increase the reaction time on judging the facial expression. Previous study on emotional conflict focused on the relationship between valence(pleasant or unpleasant) and emotional conflict, the results showed that emotional conflict effect changed when the emotional valence of target stimuli was different, that is to say, the pleasant target stimulus can produce greater conflict effect than the unpleasant stimulus. However, the cognitive process of emotional information is affected By many factors, especially the emotional arousal; emotional valence and arousal are two key dimensions of emotion, the relationship between them has been in dispute for long. Our research on the cognitive process of emotion studied the relationship between emotional valence and arousal, and discussed how emotional arousal influences emotional conflict, gender difference is an important factor too.This essay selected pictures from the IAPS (International affective picture system) to reassess them by localized way, and these pictures were adopted in the two major experiments. Experiment 1 used the reassessed emotional picture materials to investigate how emotional arousal affected the process of emotional information, and whether valence and arousal interact with each other, gender differences was discussed too; Experiment 2 adopted the modified face-picture paradigm, in which the target stimulus is emotional picture and interference stimulus is simple expression; we explored the influence of emotional arousal on processing of emotional conflict, and whether valence interacted with arousal during the processing of emotional conflict, gender difference was considered.Compared and synthesized the results of the two researches, this essay worked out the following conclusions:First, the arousal level of emotional stimuli influenced emotional processing, and this effect was restricted by valence. When the valence was negative, arousal level had significant influence on emotional processing:the reaction time of low arousal pictures was longer than high arousal pictures, and the influence was not significant while the valence was positive.Second, men and women showed significant difference when processing high arousal emotional pictures, under the high arousal condition, women reacted faster, while the low arousal condition had no significant influence.Third, the emotional conflict effect was significant:when the valence of the picture and the expression was conflict, subjects’ reaction time was longer than the valence inconsistency condition, and different from previous studies, the conflict effect was not affected by the emotional valence type.Last, arousal level of emotion significantly affected emotional conflict. Under the low arousal condition, the reaction time of valence inconsistent stimulus was significantly longer than valence consistent stimulus; under the high arousal condition, the reaction time difference between valence inconsistent stimulus and consistent stimulus was not significant.