Emotion Induced Blindness In Adult Survivors Of Childhood Psychological Maltreatment

This study investigated the effect of childhood psychological maltreatment experience on emotion induced blindness,and whether reward connection can effectively attenuated the emotion-induced blindness of psychological maltreatment individuals,so as to reveal the mechanism of attention bias.The current study used the Child Psychological Maltreatment Scale（CPMS）to screen participants.In Experiment 1,the classical emotion-induced blindness（EIB）paradigm was used to compare the target response accuracy of psychological maltreatment individuals and non maltreatment individuals after different emotional distractor.The purpose is to explore the characteristics of emotion induced blindness in psychological maltreatment individuals.Experiment 2 used the reward connection paradigm to connect buildings with high rewards and landscape with,low rewards.Then the participants completed the emotion-induced blindness task.By compared the behavioral data of psychological maltreatment group and non psychological maltreatment group,explored how to attenuated the emotion-induced blindness of psychological maltreatment individuals.Experiment 1 found that there was still a significant difference in the correct rate of target response after negative distraction and neutral distraction at lag6 in the psychological maltreatment group;There was no significant difference in target response accuracy between negative and neutral distraction at lag6 in the non psychological maltreatment group.It shows attention disengagement difficulties were present in the psychological maltreatment group and manifested as stronger and longer lasting effects of emotion induced visual blindness.Experiment 2 found that:（1）In the reward connection task,the optimal selection rate of psychological maltreatment group and non psychological maltreatment group in block 4 stage is significantly higher than that in block 1 stage,indicating that both groups will connect different target tasks with corresponding rewards.However,by subtracted the optimal selection rate of block 4 and block 1,it is found that the subtraction difference in the psychological maltreatment group is significantly greater than that in the non psychological maltreatment group.It showed that in the learning connection stage,the learning degree of psychological maltreatment group is better.（2）In the psychological maltreatment group,the target task accuracy of high reward connection was significantly higher than that of low reward connection at lag2 and lag4.For the non psychological maltreatment group,there was no significant difference between the correct rate of high reward connection and low reward connection in lag 2,and the correct rate of high reward connection was significantly higher than that of low reward connection in lag 4.According to the results from the first and second study,the present research arrived at the conclusion that:（1）The childhood maltreatment experiences modulated the time window of attention bias.The time window of EIB in the psychological maltreatment individuals is longer than the non psychological maltreatment individuals,the psychological maltreatment individuals had trouble in disengaging attention from the negative stimuli.（2）Reward connection can attenuate the emotion-induced blindness in adult survivors of childhood psychological maltreatment.