Abstract
Response inhibition and conflict control on affective information can be regarded as two important emotion regulation and cognitive control processes. The emotional Go/Nogo flanker paradigm was adopted and participant’s event-related potentials (ERPs) were analyzed to investigate how response inhibition and conflict control interplayed. The behavioral findings revealed that participants showed higher accuracy to identify happy faces in congruent condition relative to that in incongruent condition. The electrophysiological results manifested that response inhibition and conflict control interplayed during the detection/conflict monitoring stage, and Nogo-N2 was more negative in the incongruent trials than the congruent trials. With regard to the inhibitory control/conflict resolution stage, Nogo responses induced greater frontal P3 and parietal P3 responses than Go responses did. The difference waveforms of N2 and parietal P3 showed that response inhibition and conflict control had distinct processes, and the multiple responses requiring both conflict control and response inhibition processes induced stronger monitoring and resolution processes than conflict control. The current study manifested that response inhibition and conflict control on emotional information required separable neural mechanisms during emotion regulation processes.
Highlights
Emotion regulation is essential for individual’s social life (Gross, 2015), and it refers to the attempts to influence which emotions to have, when to have them, and how to experience or express them (Gross, 1998)
The current study investigated the interaction between response inhibition and conflict control on facial expressions
Taken together with the difference waveform analyses, the current findings showed that response inhibition and conflict control on emotional information relied on distinct processes
Summary
Emotion regulation is essential for individual’s social life (Gross, 2015), and it refers to the attempts to influence which emotions to have, when to have them, and how to experience or express them (Gross, 1998). Brydges et al (2013) further illustrated that N2 responses gradually frontally distributed with age for response inhibition, and the N2 latencies and amplitudes became shortened or decreased with age development; with regard to conflict control, the significant N2 effect was only shown in adults but not in children Emotional stimuli, such as facial expressions, might carry essential social-emotional information, and the accurate and proper detection, perception, management and regulation on facial expressions were essential for individual’s emotion regulation (Calder and Young, 2005). It was hypothesized that the situation that required both Nogo responses and conflict control would require greater N2 and P3 activation compared to other conditions, and response inhibition and conflict control in emotional context induced different brain activities
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