Abstract
Emotions affect temporal information processing in the low-frequency time window of a few seconds, but little is known about their effect in the high-frequency domain of some tens of milliseconds. The present study aims to investigate whether negative and positive emotional states influence the ability to discriminate the temporal order of visual stimuli, and whether gender plays a role in temporal processing. Due to the hemispheric lateralization of emotion, a hemispheric asymmetry between the left and the right visual field might be expected. Using a block design, subjects were primed with neutral, negative and positive emotional pictures before performing temporal order judgment tasks. Results showed that male subjects exhibited similarly reduced order thresholds under negative and positive emotional states, while female subjects demonstrated increased threshold under positive emotional state and reduced threshold under negative emotional state. Besides, emotions influenced female subjects more intensely than male subjects, and no hemispheric lateralization was observed. These observations indicate an influence of emotional states on temporal order processing of visual stimuli, and they suggest a gender difference, which is possibly associated with a different emotional stability.
Notes
In the staircase method, initial SOA = 170 ms, maximal SOA = 210 ms, minimal SOA = 0 ms; initial step size = 40 ms, with step size cut in half after each reversal, minimal step size = 5 ms; termination criteria is 50 trials. The threshold is the average of the last 5 reversals. SOA: Stimulus Onset Asynchrony.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Projects 31371018, 91120004, and J1103602).
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Liang, W., Zhang, J. & Bao, Y. Gender-specific effects of emotional modulation on visual temporal order thresholds. Cogn Process 16 (Suppl 1), 143–148 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0709-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0709-6