The Influence Of Trait Mindfulness On Adolescents’ Facial Emotion Recognition And Processing

Facial emotion recognition ability is an important component of emotional intelligence which is related to the success of individual social interaction,communication and relationship with others.However,the acuity of facial emotion recognition involves the processing function of facial emotion.In the past 20 years,the study of mindfulness intervention on emotion recognition and processing has focused on adults.It has been proved that mindfulness intervention can effectively improve the emotion regulation function of adults,but there are few studies on adolescents.Evidence has proved that due to the developmental characteristics of adolescent’s brain,the effects of adolescents’ trait mindfulness and mindfulness intervention are different from those of adults.Compared with adults,adolescents’ cognitive control ability is not fully developed,and the "top-down" regulation is less used in emotional processing.In view of the differences between adolescents and adults,and the unclear role of mindfulness in adolescents’ emotion regulation and emotion intelligence,it has become a new research hotspot to evaluate the effectiveness of mindfulness.Therefore,the purpose of this study is to explore the influence of trait mindfulness on adolescents’ facial emotion recognition and processing.In Study 1,according to the first and the last 27% of scores of The Mindful Attention Awareness Scale(MAAS),202 adolescents aged 11-14 were divided into high-level of trait mindfulness group and low-level of trait mindfulness group.Finally,111 subjects were selected to participate in the facial emotion recognition experiment.It is found that the overall recognition accuracy of emotional faces of individuals with high trait mindfulness is significantly higher than that of individuals with low trait mindfulness.From the perspective of component emotion,the recognition accuracy of happy emotions(positive emotions)of individuals with high trait mindfulness is significantly higher than that of individuals with low trait mindfulness.However,individuals with low trait mindfulness had significantly shorter overall recognition reaction time than those with high trait mindfulness.Specifically,individuals with low trait mindfulness had significantly shorter overall reaction time duringthe recognition of calm and disgust facial emotions than those with high trait mindfulness.In Study 2,subjects in Study 1 were selected to participate in the emotional face processing experiment.In the experiment,the process dissociation procedure(PDP)was used)to study the recognition behavior of emotional face pictures of subjects,and found that on the conscious level the subjects with high trait mindfulness had significantly higher memory accuracy of emotional facethan the subjects with low trait mindfulness.But on the unconscious level,the subjects with high trait mindfulness had significantly lower memory accuracy of emotional face than the subjects with low trait mindfulness;on the main effect of emotion,the two groups of subjects had the lowest conscious extraction rate on the happy facial emotion,which was significantly lower than that of anger,surprise,fear,calm and disgust.In addition,the conscious extraction rate of sad face was significantly lower than that of surprise,fear,calm and disgust.On the contrary,at the unconscious level the happy face extraction rate was significantly higher than that of all other emotions.The sad face extraction rate was significantly higher than that of surprise,fear,calm and disgust,and the interaction effect between trait mindfulness and emotions was not significant.Through the two studies,it is found that:(1)Adolescents with high trait mindfulness have higher accuracy in emotional face recognition,and trait mindfulness can reduce their emotional response speed;(2)Trait mindfulness can promote their awareness of emotional information and reduce their automatic behavior caused by unconscious perception of emotional information.That is to say,the recognition of emotional faces by adolescents with high trait mindfulness is separated from their processing of emotional faces.Mindfulness can effectively improve adolescents’ accuracy of emotional face recognition and reduce their response speed,but in the processing stage,the inhibition of mindfulness will make the emotional response of adolescents tend to be peaceful.The findings of this study can fill in the gap in the research of the mechanism of mindfulness in adolescents’ emotion recognition and processing to a certain extent,and further reveal the differences of recognition and processing of seven different facial emotions by individuals with different levels of trait mindfulness.In addition,we explored the behaviors of individuals with different levels of trait mindfulness from the two levels of consciousness(top-down)and unconsciousness(bottom-up).The present study can also improve young people’s level of recognition and processing of emotional faces,reduce their overreaction to emotions,and in turn provide theoretical guidance and practical basis for the improvement of young people’s emotional regulation and emotional intelligence.