The Influence Of Empathy On Emotional Conflict Adaption Effect

Emotional conflict refers to the interference of irrelevant emotional stimuli on current cognitive tasks.With the development of modern science and technology and the acceleration of people’s life rhythm,there are more and more problems caused by emotional conflict.Emotional conflict has an important ecological significance for human survival and life.In-depth study of emotional conflict is also in line with the trend of social development.The conflict adaptation effect(CAE)is also known as the Gratton effect,which was put forward by Gratton in 1992.It means that in the consistency sequence task,when the subjects experience the conflict in the previous trial,they will better solve the conflict in the current trial.Researchers believe that there are two main influencing factors on emotional conflict and conflict adaptation: cognitive factors and non cognitive factors.Cognitive factors include attention resources and working memory,non cognitive factors include emotion and motivation,individual differences and so on.Empathy is not only the ability to understand others’ emotional state,but also the ability to share others’ emotional state.It is also the ability of individuals to understand others’ emotions and make appropriate responses.Some studies have shown that empathy affects emotional processing,but others have shown that empathy is actually composed of two independent components: emotional empathy and cognitive empathy.The core structure of emotional empathy is amygdala and IFG.The inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobule are important components of the mirror neuron system(MNS).They are responsible for the acquisition and perception of emotional information from the bottom up.The core structure of cognitive empathy is ventromedial prefrontal,VM)is responsible for the later emotional assessment under the control of consciousness.In the past,there are many researches on the influence of empathy ability on emotion processing,but there are few researches on the distinction between emotional empathy and cognitive empathy.Therefore,it is necessary to make a more detailed classification of empathy.In the past,the researches on the adaptive effects of emotional conflict and emotional conflict were mostly based on the variable paradigm of cognitive conflict,while the most widely used paradigms were word face Stroop paradigm,emotional flanker paradigm and emotional Simon paradigm.Kornblum distinguished these three paradigms in the dimension coincidence model proposed in 1992.Although all three paradigms can study cognitive conflict,there are essential differences in the coincidence relationship between stimulus and response and the source of conflict.In this study,we used word face Stroop paradigm,emotional flanker paradigm and emotional Simon paradigm to explore the influence of emotional empathy and cognitive empathy on emotional conflict and adaptive effect of emotional conflict.The study adopted a three factor mixed experiment design of 2(emotional empathy ability: high,low)× 2(cognitive empathy ability: high,low)× 2 trial consistency(consistent,inconsistent),and adopted the Chinese version of Interpersonal Reactivity Index,IRI-C)scale selected 101 individuals with four different empathy abilities to participate in the experiment.The results showed that cognitive empathy had an effect on the adaptive effect of emotional conflict and emotional conflict based on the coincidence of stimulus related information and stimulus unrelated information,while emotional empathy had no effect.The results of this study also confirmed the previous studies that emotional empathy and cognitive empathy are two independent components.Finally,we found that empathy had no effect on conflict and conflict adaptation based on unrelated stimuli and responses.