Differences in the emotional conflict task between individuals with high and low social adjustment: An ERP study

Abstract

To investigate the emotional conflict processing during the processing of emotional stimuli in individuals with different levels of social adjustment through developing an event-related potential (ERP) method, the study used positive words (happy), negative words (disgusted), positive faces and negative faces as experimental materials for a face-word Stroop emotional conflict task, which was completed by 34 participants. For the N2 component, there was a significant difference between the high and low social adjustment groups for the congruent condition; the low social adjustment group evoked more negative amplitude under the congruent condition. Under the incongruent condition, there was a marginally significant difference between the high and low social adjustment groups; the low social adjustment group evoked more negative amplitude under the incongruent condition. For the SP component, there were no significant differences for both the high and low social adjustment group between the congruent and incongruent conditions of emotional conflict. However, within the low social adjustment group, the incongruent evoked more positive amplitude. Our findings indicate that the difference in the emotional conflict process between individuals with high and low social adjustment mainly lies in the early processing stages of emotional information. That is, for both congruent and incongruent emotional stimuli, individuals with high social adjustment showed better emotional conflict monitoring, used less cognitive resources, and had a higher degree of automated processing than those with low social adjustment. During the later stages of emotional conflict processing, individuals with low social adjustment showed poorer conflict processing.