The effect of negative emotion on the reaction time : An event-related brain potentials study

Abstract

This study was designed to examine the effect of negative emotion on reaction times (RTs). RTs and eventrelated brain potentials (ERPs) for emotional pictorial stimuli (“people”) were recorded during discriminative RT tasks. In the Go/Nogo task, participants were required to press a button responding to “people”. In the other, the Stop/Nostop task, participants were instructed to press a button if the present stimulus was not “car”. The latter was purported to eliminate the difference of difficulty in identifying “people” between the negative and the neutral stimuli. A slowdown of RTs for the negative stimuli was demonstrated in both tasks. For the negative stimuli, this slowdown was accompanied by the changes in the latency of the P3 component in the Go/Nogo task, reflecting stimulus evaluation processes, but not in the Stop/Nostop task. P2 and N2 components were affected by the stimulus conditions and/or the task conditions. Moreover, in both tasks, the great increases in P3 amplitudes were elicited by the negative stimuli. However, no correlations between these changes in the ERPs and the slowdown of RTs were detected. These results suggest that the effect of emotion influenced the response activation processes.