Shen De-li

Modulation of Conscientiousness on Medial Frontal Negativity in Negative Emotions: an ERP Study on Ultimatum Game

The event-related potential technique was used to explore whether the medial frontal negativity (MFN) was impacted by conscientiousness in different emotional states. We found that compared to negative emotions and fair offers, larger MFN amplitudes were found in positive emotions and unfair offers; in negative emotions and unfair offers, conscientiousness and the amplitude of MFN had a positive relationship, related to positive emotions and fair offers. The results reveal that the MFN reflected the cognitive evaluate process of decision-making situations and positive emotions benefited the cognition of different situations; conscientiousness enhanced the economic incomes by weakening the MFN in negative emotions and unfair situation. This study provides psychophysiological evidence which has high ecological validity of the difference of MFN in real-life interaction task.

Age-Related Changes in Executive Inhibition of Emotional and Non-emotional Interference

To examine the development of inhibitory capacity of emotional and cognitive conflicting interference by conducting a pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm, 96 participants in four age groups (9 yr, 12 yr, 20-24 yr, 68-74 yr) were required to name the colors of filtered images consisting of a series of pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant pictures. All the pictures were chosen from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and rated by a pilot group of undergraduate students. Results indicated that development of emotional interference inhibitory function was more rapid than that of cognitive conflicting interference inhibitory function; as for the aging aspect, the findings support the contrary. The inhibition of the emotional and non-emotional interference dissociates in the developmental time course, which supply new data for the research on inhibition of location and identity. It is useful to distinguish these two types of inhibitory processes in the identity inhibition. And the related paradigm shows promise as a nonlexical, ecologically valid approach to evaluating the selective processing of emotional distracters.