Abstract
This research investigated the individual behavioral and electrophysiological differences during emotional conflict adaptation processes in preschool children. Thirty children (16 girls, mean age 5.44 ± 0.28 years) completed an emotional Flanker task (stimulus-stimulus cognitive control, S-S) and an emotional Simon task (stimulus-response cognitive control, S-R). Behaviorally, the 5-year-old preschool children exhibited reliable congruency sequence effects (CSEs) in the emotional contexts, with faster response times (RTs) and lower error rates in the incongruent trials preceded by an incongruent trial (iI trial) than in the incongruent trials preceded by a congruent trial (cI trial). Regarding electrophysiology, the children demonstrated longer N2 and P3 latencies in the incongruent trials than in the congruent trials during emotional conflict control processes. Importantly, the boys showed a reliable CSE of N2 amplitude when faced with fearful target expression. Moreover, 5-year-old children showed better emotional CSEs in response to happy targets than to fearful targets as demonstrated by the magnitude of CSEs in terms of the RT, error rate, N2 amplitude and P3 latency. In addition, the results demonstrated that 5-year-old children processed S-S emotional conflicts and S-R emotional conflicts differently and performed better on S-S emotional conflicts than on S-R emotional conflicts according to the comparison of the RT-CSE and P3 latency-CSE values. The current study provides insight into how emotionally salient stimuli affect cognitive processes among preschool children.
Highlights
Childhood is a key period for cognitive development (Rothbart et al, 2003; Rueda et al, 2004; Carlson, 2005)
They asked participants to identify emotional facial expressions while ignoring emotional words; Emotional Conflict Adaptation an emotional conflict was generated when the emotional facial expression was incongruent with the emotional word, such as a happy expression with the word ‘‘fear.’’ Four emotional conflict conditions corresponded to the congruence between the preceding trial and the current trial: a congruent trial preceded by a congruent trial, an incongruent trial preceded by a congruent trial, a congruent trial preceded by an incongruent trial, and an incongruent trial preceded by an incongruent trial
The corrected Bonferroni multiple comparison tests revealed that when faced with fearful target expressions, the girls had larger N2 amplitude-congruency sequence effects (CSEs) values than the boys, t(28) = 1.88, p < 0.02; the boys showed larger N2 amplitude-CSE values when faced with happy target expressions than when faced with fearful target expressions, t(13) = 2.76, p < 0.01
Summary
Childhood is a key period for cognitive development (Rothbart et al, 2003; Rueda et al, 2004; Carlson, 2005). Etkin et al (2006) used a face-word Stroop task to study the interaction between cognition and emotion processes. They asked participants to identify emotional facial expressions while ignoring emotional words; Emotional Conflict Adaptation an emotional conflict was generated when the emotional facial expression was incongruent with the emotional word, such as a happy expression with the word ‘‘fear.’’ Four emotional conflict conditions corresponded to the congruence between the preceding trial and the current trial: a congruent trial preceded by a congruent trial (cC condition), an incongruent trial preceded by a congruent trial (cI condition), a congruent trial preceded by an incongruent trial (iC condition), and an incongruent trial preceded by an incongruent trial (iI condition). Emotional CSEs have been observed in adults (Etkin et al, 2006; Chechko et al, 2014; Worsham et al, 2015), whether young children can show emotional CSEs remains unknown; in the present study, we explored the relationship between cognition and emotion in preschool children from the perspective of emotional CSEs
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