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Differential Cognitive and Adaptation Processing of Core and Socio-moral Disgust

Author: HuangHao
Tutor: LiHong
School: Southwestern University
Course: Basic Psychology
Keywords: core disgust socio-moral disgust cogntive processes adaptation event-related potential
CLC: B842.1
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 224
Quote: 3
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Abstract

As a basic emotion, disgust is elicited by offensive or repulsive objects and behaviors. Disgust is an opening emotion and it’s stimulus is growing with evolution.Rozin et al. divide the disgust into five category by their different stimulus which are distaste、core distgust、animal-nature、disgust interpersonal disgust and moral disgust. Marziller et al. divide the disgust into primitive disgut and complex disgust by using emotional profile method.The differences between different kinds of disgust are worth research.Rozin et al. proposed a possible three-layer scheme of disgust analysis,the first level is disgust stimulus system,the second level is the disgust evaluation system which contains a series of mental processes.And the third level is the disgust output program. There are three pathways through which an elicitor could activate the disgust output program,(1) may trigger the disgust output program directly such as distaeste;(2) stimulus system run through the disgust evaluaion system(stimulus evaluate、offensive feeling、contamination belief)firstly then trigger the distgust output program such as core disgust;(3)stimulus system trgger the other evaluation system such as the verbal label "disgust" firstly then trigger the distgust output program.There are lots of researches about the disgust stimulus system and the disgust output program now,but few about the disgust evaluation system.Many kinds of stimulus in real life can elicit disgust response, we ignore most of them through avoidance, reconstruction and adaptation. Among them, adaptation is the most common phenomenon in multicellular organism, in other words, organism will decrease the neural response for these stimulus which did not cause and meaningful results. Simpson et al. found that croe disgust and socio-moral disgust showed different patterns of adaptation when disgust stimulus repeatedly presented. However, how the repeated disgust stimulus impact irrelated cognitive task is still unknow. In other words, how disgust impact cognition.Experiment 1 via ERP technique explored the difference of cognitive mechanism between core disgust and socio-moral disgust. Experiment 2 explored how the repeated disgust stimulus impact emotional experience and irrelated cognitive task. An implicit task (lexcial decision) and a explicit task (emotional decision) were used in Experiment 1. In both tasks, core disgust and socio-moral disgust elicited the same ERP components named P2, N2 and late positive component (LPC). More importantly, core disgust elicited significantly larger P2 and N2 amplitude than socio-moral disgust; but LPC amplitude didn’t have any significant difference. P2 and N2 amplitude elicited by core disgust in implicit task was not significantly different from in explicit task; LPC in explicit task was significantly larger than in implicit task. Socio-moral disgust showed a similar tendency with core disgust. The results suggest that both the core and socio-moral disgust are automatic processing. However, core disgust get more early cognitive resources than socio-moral disgust, which may associated with the mechanism of human evolution; and two types of disgust elicit similar emotional experience. A digit-parity task and word evaluation task were used to explore the adaptation parten of two types of disgust. In the digital-parity task, along with the repeation of disgust stimulus, the impact of core disgust getting more and more small, which showed in subblock 1 and subblock 2. By contrast, the impact of socio-moral disgust was preserved till subblock 3. In the word evaluation task, the arousal of new core disgsut words, which did not presented in digit-parity task, was higher than the old ones, which did presented in digit-parity task; and the valence was more lower. However, there is no significant difference in arousal and valence between presented and non presented socio-moral disgust words. These results of experiment 2 indicated that core disgust showed obvious adaptation along with the repeation stimulus; whereas did not show apparent adaptation phenomenon.These two experimental results show that core disgust and socio-moral disgust have different cognitive processes and the adaptation partten. (1) Cognitive processes of core disgust and socio-moral disgust through comparable evaluational process, but the processing intensity was different in the early stage; in the late stage, both types of disgust elicit the similar emotional experience. (2) Core disgust and socio-moral disgust showed different adaptation partten. Along with the repeation of stimulus, emotional experience of core disgust was wane, and the impact on cognitive task get small. By contrast, there is no obvious adaptation for socio-moral disgust, the emtional experience did not decreased and the impact on cognitive task was preserved.

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