Liu Fang, Gao Chao, Gao Heming, Liu Wen
College of Psychology, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China.
Department and Institute of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2022 Jun 21;16:921802. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2022.921802. eCollection 2022.
Emotion regulation in childhood and adolescence is related to their social development. Better emotion regulation is associated with great individual academic performance and mental health. However, compared with the research on emotion regulation strategies, children's automatic emotion regulation has been less investigated. Using event-related potential (ERP) technology, this study adopts the cued-emotion Go/Nogo paradigm to investigate the processing characteristics of automatic emotion regulation in children aged 8-12 years. The current study selected 34 younger group [16 boys, 18 girls, mean (M) ± SD = 8.91 ± 0.75], and 31 older group [18 boys, 13 girls, M ± SD = 11.26 ± 0.45]. The results showed that, for Nogo trials, the amplitude of N2 and P3 evoked by emotional faces were significantly larger than those evoked by neutral faces, reflecting the cognitive conflict experienced and the process of children's automatic response inhibition to emotional stimuli, respectively. However, no significant difference in N2 and P3 amplitude were found in Go trials, which may indicate that children aged 8-12 showed similar top-down control and similar motivated attention in this experiment, respectively. Further analysis found that the negative affect of temperament was significantly positively correlated with Nogo-P3 induced by neutral pictures ( = 0.37, < 0.001), and preadolescents' social anxiety was significantly positively correlated with Nogo-P3 followed by neutral pictures ( = 0.31, < 0.01). These findings can provide inspiration and empirical support for the promotion and intervention of emotion regulation in children and adolescents.
儿童和青少年期的情绪调节与他们的社会发展相关。更好的情绪调节与个体更好的学业成绩和心理健康相关。然而，与情绪调节策略的研究相比，儿童的自动情绪调节研究较少。本研究采用事件相关电位（ERP）技术，采用线索情绪Go/Nogo范式，研究8至12岁儿童自动情绪调节的加工特点。本研究选取了34名年龄较小的儿童[16名男孩，18名女孩，平均年龄（M）±标准差（SD）=8.91±0.75]，以及31名年龄较大的儿童[18名男孩，13名女孩，M±SD = 11.26±0.45]。结果显示，在Nogo试验中，情绪面孔诱发的N2和P3波幅显著大于中性面孔诱发的波幅，分别反映了所经历的认知冲突以及儿童对情绪刺激的自动反应抑制过程。然而，在Go试验中未发现N2和P3波幅有显著差异，这可能表明8至12岁的儿童在本实验中分别表现出相似的自上而下控制和相似的动机性注意。进一步分析发现，气质的消极情绪与中性图片诱发的Nogo-P3显著正相关（r = 0.37，p < 0.001），青春期前儿童的社交焦虑与中性图片之后的Nogo-P3显著正相关（r = 0.31，p < 0.01）。这些发现可为儿童和青少年情绪调节的促进和干预提供启示和实证支持。
