Saarland University, D-66041 Saarbrücken, Germany.
Saarland University, D-66041 Saarbrücken, Germany.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2020 May;193:104795. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104795. Epub 2020 Feb 1.
This study examined interactions between cognitive control and emotional processing throughout adolescent development. In particular, we investigated whether age differences in response inhibition and initiation were influenced by an emotional expression of faces and whether the effects differed from processing of nonemotional features of faces. Therefore, we applied two versions of a Go/No-go task, an emotional task requiring responding or withholding responding to happy and angry faces, and a gender task including decisions to female and male faces in a large sample (N = 187, age range = 9-18 years). Considering theoretical assumptions of dual-system models that mid-adolescents are more susceptible to the processing of emotional contents, we expected more inefficient response inhibition on happy and angry trials than on neutral trials. We also expected that these effects would be specific to emotional contents. Results indicated that both response inhibition and initiation showed linear improvements with increasing age. Response inhibition was hampered in the presence of happy and angry faces, especially in mid-adolescents and late adolescents. In contrast, response initiation was highly facilitated to happy faces, indicating a happy effect, leading to more accurate responding in all age groups and to faster responding especially in late adolescents. Children, in contrast to late adolescents, were more accurate in response inhibition and initiation when the gender was task relevant. Results are in line with dual-system models, assuming a higher sensitivity to emotional features from mid-adolescents onward but not to other features such as gender.
本研究考察了认知控制和情绪处理在整个青少年发展过程中的相互作用。特别是，我们调查了面孔的情绪表达是否影响了反应抑制和启动的年龄差异，以及这种影响是否与面孔的非情绪特征的处理不同。因此，我们在一个大样本（N=187，年龄范围为 9-18 岁）中应用了两种 Go/No-go 任务版本，一种是需要对快乐和愤怒的面孔做出反应或不做出反应的情绪任务，另一种是包括对女性和男性面孔做出决策的性别任务。考虑到双重系统模型的理论假设，即青少年中期更容易受到情绪内容的影响，我们预计在快乐和愤怒的试验中比在中性试验中反应抑制效率更低。我们还预计这些影响将是特定于情绪内容的。结果表明，随着年龄的增长，反应抑制和启动都呈线性提高。在快乐和愤怒的面孔存在的情况下，反应抑制受到阻碍，尤其是在青少年中期和青少年晚期。相比之下，对快乐的面孔的反应启动非常迅速，表明存在快乐效应，导致所有年龄组的反应更加准确，尤其是在青少年晚期的反应更快。与青少年晚期相比，儿童在性别与任务相关时，反应抑制和启动更加准确。结果与双重系统模型一致，该模型假设从中年后期开始对情绪特征更加敏感，但对其他特征（如性别）不敏感。
