| dc.description.abstract | In the current study, a series of emotional Stroop tasks were used to examine the emotion－cognition interactions across the sex offenders and the normal controls. According to the previous research, the individuals with various emotional and drug-abuse disorders demonstrated attentional bias for the stimuli specifically related to their characteristics. Therefore, we employed the emotional Stroop paradigm including both versions of words and pictures (Exp. 2 & Exp. 3) to investigate whether the sex offenders showed the differential attentional bias effect compared to the controls while their brain potentials were measured.
In the experiment 2, we found the longer reaction time for the erotic words both in the sex offenders and the normal controls. The ERP results showed that the main effects of emotion on the P2, N2 and late positive potential (LPP) in the sex offenders while on the N2 and LPP in the controls. More interesting, due to the marginally significant interaction effect of emotion and group on the LPP component, this indicated the sex offenders seemed to pay less sustained-attention to the erotic words compared to the controls. We suggest that the sex offenders might use the deliberate regulation of the erotic influence. Furthermore, the positive relations between the LPP and the bias scores were significant in the controls. However, instead of the LPP, the N2 component positively correlated with the bias scores in the sex offenders.
In the experiment 3, behaviorally, there was no main effect of emotion in both groups, but the ERP results revealed that there were significant modulations of emotion on the early and late components, the N2 and LPP, in both groups. Furthermore, the differential scalp distribution patterns of emotional modulations on the two groups were found, that was, we found a significant three-way interaction effect (Caudality × Emotion × Group).
In summary, the current study demonstrated that the attentional bias effect occurred not only behaviorally but also in our brains. Namely, we found the emotional modulations on the ERP components. These indicate that the capacity-limited attention resource was voluntarily devoted to the emotionally salient events. More important, the different performances between the sex offenders and the controls may imply that there were differential neural mechanisms underlying the emotion－cognition interactions between the two groups. Further, the possible causes, implications, and directions for future research are discussed. | en_US |