健康与遗传心理学研究室知识库

情绪时刻伴随着人们的生活，是人的心理活动中动力机制的重要组成部分。随着情感神经科学的兴起，情绪与认知的相互关系逐渐受到了研究者的重视。一方面，当个体所接触的情绪信息对当前的认知任务产生干扰时，就出现了情绪冲突。对情绪冲突进行控制，无路是对于正常机体功能的发挥，还是对情感障碍患者的诊断和治疗都具有重要的意义。但目前关于情绪冲突的研究还刚刚起步，还处于确定“情绪冲突”是否存在的粗放阶段，本项目对情绪冲突的研究进行了深入的考察。另一方面，情绪刺激还可以对动态的认知活动产生影响，木项目重点关注了学习这一重要的认知活动。

本课题的第一部分是关于情绪冲突的研究，具体包括了四项研究。研究一采用更加具有生态效度的社会场景语句作为实验材料，考察了情绪背景预期所诱发的不同步的情绪冲突的认知神经机制。结果发现在目标刺激为积极人脸时，除了诱发与同步的情绪冲突类似的脑区活动(背侧前扣带回和背外侧前额几卜分别负责情绪冲突的检测和控制)外，还发现了左侧眶额这一与情绪预期密切相关的脑区也参与到了情绪冲突中。研究二以线条人脸为材料，采用Flanks:范式，发现了积极和消极目标刺激在情绪冲突效应上的分离:在目标刺激为积极人脸的情况下表现出了明显的情绪冲突效应，而在目标刺激为消极人脸的情况下却没有表现出情绪冲突效应。这可能反映了消极目标人脸对注意的捕获和保持作用。研究三和研究四分别考察了两种典型的情感障碍患者—抑郁症和焦虑症，在情绪冲突表现上的异常。在对抑郁症患者的考察中，除了发现与前面研究中类似的情绪一致性效应外，还发现了一种特殊的情绪冲突效应，即抑郁相关词比一般消极词对积极情绪人脸的反应造成了更大的冲突，这反应了抑郁症患者典型的“抑郁相关偏向”，表明抑郁症患者在情绪加工时受到了与其抑郁症状相关的情绪刺激的更大干扰，反映了他们不同于正常人的情绪冲突异常。在对广泛焦虑症患者的考察中，结果发现，在目标刺激为积极人脸的情况下，SOA为100 ms和-100 ms时，均发现了显著的“一般”和“特殊”情绪冲突效应;在目标刺激为消极人脸的情况下，“一般情绪冲突效应”在三种soA条件下均没有出现，但“特殊情绪冲突效应”均出现了。这表明，焦虑症患者的情绪冲突效应与时间因素密切相关:在他们身上发现的“特殊情绪冲突效应”模式，可能反映了焦虑症患者对焦虑相关刺激的敏感性和注意偏向。

第二部分是情绪对语言学习影响的研究，具体包括了两项研究。研究一通过多次重复启动范式(15次重复)和结构判断任务，考察了情绪价对已习得词汇的精细化练习过程的影响。结果发现，不同情绪价的词汇的多次重复启动的总启动量差异不显著，这说明词汇加工的多次重复启动的最终效果并没有受到情绪价的影响。然而，在“饱和进程”和“高原期”两个指标上，词汇的多次重复启动过程却受到了情绪价的影响:相对于中性词和消极词，积极词的饱和进程最短，高原期的持续区间也最短;而中性词和消极词不仅饱和进程较长，高原期持续时间也较长，而且有反复。这表明积极词能够最快、最有效的完成多次重复启动过程。这可能与积极材料能够得到更精细的加工，从而形成更细致的内部联结有关。研究二则采用联结学习的范式更加直接的考察了情绪对新异词汇(韩语)学习的影响。结果发现，消极配对联结学习条件下(相比于中性条件)，习得的韩语词汇的概念义提取的正确率降低，而再认的正确率增高。这表明，消极情绪信息促进了词汇的再认，但阻碍了词汇的概念义的提取。

本课题的研究通过采用不同的范式和不同类型的被试，从不同方面考察了正常人和情绪障碍患者的情绪加工的特点，特别是情绪对认知活动的影响。这为今后的情绪研究提供了重要的启示，并为情感障碍患者的诊断和治疗提供了重要的参考。

Emotion is along with our everyday life, which is the important pant of the motivation mechanism. With the development of the affective neuroscience, the relationship between emotion and cognition has gained more and more attention.

Our brain receives millions of inputs with emotional salience in everyday life. Some of them are positively valenced, while others are negative. The competition between different kinds of emotional valence then appears and interferes with the ongoing cognitive demands, which is called emotional conflict. As successful emotional responses play a crucial role in survival and adaptation to the environment, our brain must keep monitoring continuously so as to control and resolve such emotional conflict. Thus the investigation of emotional conflict is important for both normal people and clinical emotional disorders (e.g., depression and anxiety disorder). however, only several studies have directly addressed this issue so far. Our research will explore this issue further.

Pant I consisted of four studies (Study 1-4), investigating the mechanismunderlying emotional conflict. Using sentences describing social context as stimuli which have snore ecological validity, study I explored the neural correlates underlying emotional conflict induced by asynchronous distracters. Results showed that when the target face was negative, no significant behavioral evidences or brain regions were observed associated with effect of emotional conflict, which may be due to the mechanism of negative bias. When the target face was positive, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (d1PFC), and left inferior orbitofi0ontal cortex (OFC) were found to be activated in the incongruent minus congruent contrast. Besides replicating the results (i.e., dACC in the monitoring and d1PFC in response control of emotional conflict) from existing studies on emotional conflict from synchronous distracters, W e extended those findings by S110WlIlg that the OFC, a region associated with expectation of emotional outcomes and implementation of adaptive change, was also involved in emotional conflict. Study 2 investigates whether the effect of emotional conflict varied depending on positive and negative target. Results showed that, when the target face was positively valenced, there was significant emotional conflict effect. But no obvious emotional conflict effect was observed when the target was negative. A complementary experiment excluded the possibility that such dissociation was due to perceptual differences between the target stimuli. Study 3 and 4 investigated the emotional conflict in two typical types of emotional disorders, depression and anxiety disorder, also adopting emotional priming paradigm. In study 3, we found the classic emotional priming effects in normal subjects, which is consistent with the former experiments. Results also revealed special emotional conflict effects for depressed subjects. The depression-related words priming introduced greater emotional conflict effects compared to general negative words when the target faces were positively valenced, which may due to the `depression-related bias' in depressed subjects. That means, when the distracters were related to depression, the interference was greater in depressed people than normal ones. Study 4 found that when the target faces were positively valenced, both the "general" emotional conflict effect, and the "special" emotional conflict effect induced by the anxiety-related words, were significant when SOA=100 ms and SOA =-100 ms. When the target faces were negatively valenced. there were significant "special" emotional conflict effects among the three BOA conditions, but no "general" emotional conflict effects in either SOA. The pattern of the "special" emotional conflict in GAD may be due to the attentional bias and vigilance to anxiety-related information.

Emotional stimuli could influence the dynamic cognitive activities. The current research focuses on "learning" to investigate the modulation mechanism of emotion on language learning. Part Il consisted of two studies, investigating the mechanism underlying emotional modulation mechanism underlying language learning (Study and 6). Study 5 adopted massive repetition priming to investigate whether the emotional valence of learning materials affects implicit language learning. Results found that although similar levels of asymptotic performance were reached for different valence conditions showing comparable total effects of learning. learning of the positive words was found to be associated with fewer plateaus of shorter durations and to reach saturation earlier, compared with neutral and negative words. The results showed for the first time that the emotional valence of learning materials has significant effects on the time course of learning so that positive materials are learned faster and more efficiently, relative to negative and neutral materials. Adopting the typical word-by-word associative learning paradigm, Study 6 investigated the emotional influence on new word learning. In the study phase, the meaning of a Korean word was explained by either a negative Chinese word or a neutral word. In the memory test, the negatively paired Korean words were recognized better than the neutrally paired Korean words. However, in the living/non-living judgment task, level of performance in conceptual retrieval of negatively paired Korean words lower contrary to the neutrally paired condition. The results suggested that, negative information facilitated the information extraction of whole words, whereas interfered with the elaborative processing and organization of semantic information of new words.

In all, through adopting two new different paradigms and different kinds of subjects, the present research investigated the neural cognitive mechanisms underlying emotional processing in both normal and emotional disorders, especially the emotional modulation on cognitive processing. Our finding provided important suggestions for researchers in the field of affective neuroscience, and offered valuable evidence for diagnosis and therapy of emotional disorders.