Positive and negative emotions modulate attention allocation in color-flanker task processing: Evidence from event related potentials

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of emotions in conflict processing. Behavioral and event related potential (ERP) data were acquired from twenty participants while they were performing a color-flanker task, in which the stimuli were emotional and neutral words. Through temporal principal component analysis (PCA) of ERP, three PCA components were extracted with their time windows mapped to three ERP components: N1, N2 and P3. Further analysis revealed, when the stimuli were the positive words, N1 was marginally greater for the congruent condition than for the incongruent condition (p = .06); while the stimuli were the negative words, N1 was greater for the incongruent condition than for the congruent condition (p = .02); however, no significant interaction effect involving the valence of words (positive vs. negative) and the color congruency (congruent vs. incongruent) was found on N2, P3 and the behavior data. The result suggested that negative emotion might lead to more attention allocation in the incongruent processing, while positive emotion might lead to more attention allocation in the congruent processing. Furthermore, ERP source analysis in the present study confirmed anterior cingulate cortex was involved in the conflict monitoring mechanism.