The Effect Of Negative Emotion State On Working Memory Flexibility Processing ——The Evidence From ERP

Individuals usually store established information in their cognitive system,but these information does not exist continuously.Once the environment changes,individuals need to selectively use new information to replace old information.This process is called working memory updating.Working memory updating is usually considered as an important indicator of processing flexibility.It is mainly realized through two independent manipulation processes,that is,first open a gate,and then complete the memory updating of information.Although a large number of previous studies have investigated the update mechanism of working memory through behavioral,EEG,magnetic resonance and other technologies,these studies are difficult to separate the process of gate system and memory updating process.At the same time,individual negative emotional state has been found to be an important factor affecting working memory updating,but there is also a lack of relevant research on how negative emotional state affects the two processes.To solve the above problems,this study will further explore through reference-back task and event-related potential（ERP）technology.In Experiment 1,while playing background music,participants were asked to recall sad events or neutral events to induce negative or neutral emotional states respectively,and then completed a reference-back task and recorded EEG signals.Behavioral results showed that there was no interaction between emotional state and task type.EEG results showed that negative emotional state inhibited the activation of NSW in frontal cortex in the late processing of gate open state,but this effect was not observed in the processing of gate closed state;At the same time,the PSW difference between memory update task and memory maintenance task in negative emotional state is less than that in neutral emotional state.As Experiment 1 did not observe the interaction between emotional state and task type in the behavior results,in order to explore whether this result originates from the dominant effect brought by cues and offsets the adverse effects brought by negative emotional state,experiment 2 further explored the impact of negative emotional state on the process of memory update without cues through behavior experiments.In Experiment 2,the reference-back task was modified appropriately and no cues were presented.The results showed that negative emotional state only increased the error rate of memory maintenance task,but had no effect on memory update task.To sum up,this study discusses the relationship between negative emotional state and working memory flexibility processing,further enriches the theoretical basis of working memory processing,and mainly draws the following conclusions:（1）individuals in the state of negative emotion have specific damage in the later processing of the gate open state and the process of memory update;（2）negative emotional states had no significant effect on the early stages of memory updating.