Implicit Emotional Task Research Articles

Attention shortage resistance of negative stimuli in an implicit emotional task

Considerable evidence from behavioral studies has indicated that people tend to pay attention to negative stimuli preferentially. The attentional bias can occur rapidly and automatically. In the current study, a ‘cue-target’ paradigm was utilized to manipulate the attention allocation. Seventeen healthy undergraduates participated in the experiment. The stimuli were emotional pictures (positive, neutral and negative), which were upper and lower adjacent patchworks of a normal scene and its inverted copy. The subjects should judge whether the normal scene (compared with the inverted scene) was located in the upper or lower part of the whole patchwork. We used this implicit emotional task to avoid the task relevance effect. It was found that the amplitude of P2 waves was enlarged by the negative pictures and there was a significant interaction between the cue effect and the emotional valence. We can conclude that the negative information exerts an attentional bias effect in the emotional perception, and that the negative contents suffer less in the insufficient attention condition compared with the positive and the neutral conditions.

Social exclusion and the deconstructed state: time perception, meaninglessness, lethargy, lack of emotion, and self-awareness.

The authors hypothesize that socially excluded individuals enter a defensive state of cognitive deconstruction that avoids meaningful thought, emotion, and self-awareness, and is characterized by lethargy and altered time flow. Social rejection led to an overestimation of time intervals, a focus on the present rather than the future, and a failure to delay gratification (Experiment 1). Rejected participants were more likely to agree that "Life is meaningless" (Experiment 2). Excluded participants wrote fewer words and displayed slower reaction times (Experiments 3 and 4). They chose fewer emotion words in an implicit emotion task (Experiment 5), replicating the lack of emotion on explicit measures (Experiments 1-3 and 6). Excluded participants also tried to escape from self-awareness by facing away from a mirror (Experiment 6).

Early processing of the six basic facial emotional expressions

Facial emotions represent an important part of non-verbal communication used in everyday life. Recent studies on emotional processing have implicated differing brain regions for different emotions, but little has been determined on the timing of this processing. Here we presented a large number of unfamiliar faces expressing the six basic emotions, plus neutral faces, to 26 young adults while recording event-related potentials (ERPs). Subjects were naive with respect to the specific questions investigated; it was an implicit emotional task. ERPs showed global effects of emotion from 90 ms (P1), while latency and amplitude differences among emotional expressions were seen from 140 ms (N170 component). Positive emotions evoked N170 significantly earlier than negative emotions and the amplitude of N170 evoked by fearful faces was larger than neutral or surprised faces. At longer latencies (330–420 ms) at fronto-central sites, we also found a different pattern of effects among emotions. Localization analyses confirmed the superior and middle-temporal regions for early processing of facial expressions; the negative emotions elicited later, distinctive activations. The data support a model of automatic, rapid processing of emotional expressions.