| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立陽明大學 === 神經科學研究所 === 96 === Widom’s longitudinal study (1989) supported “the cycle of violence”. Early maltreated experience of children influence their processing of emotional perception, especially in the angry expression (Pollak & Sinha,2002).Most studies focus on conscious processing of emotion and there are relatively scarce studies that discuss unconscious processing of emotion. However, emotion influences behavior before our awareness. Do typical and atypical developed children show different pattern during unconscious processing of emotional perception? Here we adopted continuous flash suppression task, which is a useful technique to investigate unconscious and preconscious processing (Tsuchiya & Koch ,2005) in our study. Yang et al. (2007) found that fearful faces rendered invisible by continuous flash suppression emerged from suppression into awareness more quickly than faces with neutral or happy expressions.
In experiment 1 and 2, we verified Yang’s “threatening hypothesis”. We found that fearful and angry expressions were detected more quickly than neutral or sad expressions. Our results support “threatening hypothesis”.
In experiment 3, 4 and 5, we examine unconscious processing of emotional expressions by continuous flash suppression in juvenile delinquents. We found that fearful expression was detected more slowly than neutral expression in physically abused juvenile delinquents. This may imply that physically abused juvenile delinquents are relatively insensitive to other’s fearful expression, which leads them to further violent acts. Another important aspect is that the affective cue can reach the amygdala through two separate pathways (Morris et al.2002;LeDoux ,1994). Unconscious processing of emotional expressions is a subcortical pathway and conscious processing is a cortical pathway. Hence, other than unconscious processing of emotional expressions, we wished to examine if maltreated experience influences conscious emotional processing.
In experiment 6, juvenile delinquents made emotional judgment on facial expressions. The physically abused juvenile delinquents showed selective impairment in judging fearful expression. In experiment 7, juvenile delinquents made emotional judgment on eyes only. We found that the reaction time in neutral expression was longer in maltreated group than in control group.
In conclusion, our results implied that the physically abused juvenile delinquents showed selective impairment in unconscious and conscious processing of emotional expression. Since the processing of emotional expressions is fundamental in social relationship, we suggested that the physically abused juvenile delinquents therefore develop many problems in socialization and social interaction and have a higher likelihood of commission of delinquency, crimes and violent criminal behaviors.
|
|---|
