ERP comparison of emotional activity between emotion-facilitation and emotion-interference children

A subliminal emotional Stroop experiment was carried out on 24 5-year-old children with event-related potential (ERP) recording. The children were separated into emotion-facilitation (EF) and emotion-interference (EI) groups based on their behavioral reaction times in emotional and neutral conditions. ERP result of these two groups showed different brain mechanisms of emotional related processing. When processing the emotional stimuli (negative or positive emotional facial pictures), the EI group activated more at the early stage of cognitive processing which was shown as an increase of P2 amplitude, while the lack of resources at the late stage of processing caused less activation which was shown as a decrease of N4 amplitude. The EF group had a reversed processing pattern as the EI group. For all groups of children, the left hemisphere was more sensitive to emotional processing. Furthermore, the positive and negative emotional information showed a similar pattern in the emotional and cognitive processing.