自动情绪调节对负性情绪面孔注意偏向的影响

The Effect of Automatic Emotion Regulation on Attentional Bias for Negative Facial Expression

本研究通过成语匹配任务启动情绪调节目标,在情绪flanker任务中考察了自动情绪调节启动对注意偏向的影响。结果表明,中性启动条件下,被试表现出对负性情绪面孔的注意偏向,而情绪调节启动条件下,被试对正性、负性情绪面孔的注意分配不存在显著差异。该结果说明自动情绪调节可以有效地减弱被试的负性情绪面孔注意偏向。

Attentional bias towards negative faces means that,compared to positive or neutral faces,negative faces could orient attention to themselves more efficiently.Attentional bias helps people adapt more successfully in response to danger,and also contributes causally to anxiety or depression vulnerability.Therefore,there is necessity to explore the mechanism of how to regulate attentional bias.However,as most previous studies about attentional bias have examined whether attentional bias depends on perceptual or emotional differences,while little is known about the mechanism of how to affect attentional bias using top-down strategies.Previous studies have found that automatic emotion regulation can affect emotion production through attention allocation,cognition,emotional experience and behavioral response,without making much effort.Studies have also showed that automatic emotion regulation affects emotion by a top-down way.Several paradigms have been used in previous studies to prime automatic emotion regulation of the participants,such as sentence unscrambling task,subliminal priming paradigm and idiom matching task.Among these paradigms,the materials used in idiom matching task,especially Chinese four-character idioms,are widely used and understood in China and therefore easier to be applied to everyday life.The present study aimed to examine whether automatic emotion regulation,a top-down and effortless strategy,could influence attentional bias towards negative faces,by adopting emotional flanker task and idiom matching task.A 2(priming type:neutral,emotion regulation)×2(target face emotion type:positive,negative)×2(congruency:congruent,incongruent)between-subject experiment design was carried out.There were 10 blocks in total and each block consisted of 2 successive trials of the matching task and 16 successive trials of emotional flanker task.Five successive blocks used idioms concerning emotion regulation and the other half of the blocks used neutral idioms.The sequence of priming types was counterbalanced between subjects.In the idiom matching task,three Chinese four-character idioms were presented until participants made their choices between the lower two idioms to match the meaning of the upper idiom.In the emotional flanker task,a fixation cross was presented for 500 ms,immediately followed by a target face with 2 flanking faces beside it.Participants were instructed to indicate which kind of emotion the target face expressed.The faces would disappear until participants made the choice or after 1500 ms.Then the screen went blank for an inter-trial interval of 1000 ms.The result showed that in neutral priming condition,participants responded faster to congruent trials than incongruent trials with positive target(F(1,28)=6.195,p=.019,ηp^2=.181);however,when the target was negative,the RTs in congruent trials and incongruent trials showed no difference(p>.05).In emotion regulation priming condition,for both positive and negative targets,RTs in congruent trials and incongruent trials showed no difference(ps>.05).These results suggested that automatic emotion regulation,primed by the idiom matching task,could affect attentional bias towards negative faces.The results also extended previous studies suggesting that compared to those expressing positive emotion,faces expressing negative emotion could capture attention more efficiently.