Abstract: In order to investigate whether there is automatic emotion regulation (AER) in a cued Go/Nogo task and whether there is the positive effect in AER, the present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) technique to study the aging effect of AER during the judgment of the gender of emotional faces in an emotional cued Go/Nogo task. There were 12 right-handed older adults (6 females) recruited from an elderly home and 12 right-handed younger adults (6 females) recruited from a university that participated in this study. Participants were asked to discriminate the gender of a happy, neutral, or sad face presented at the center of the computer screen. These emotional faces were selected from IAPS (International Affective Picture System, IAPS). The older and the younger groups’ automatic processing of happy, neutral and sad faces were recorded. Based on previous studies, the N2 and P3 components at subset of sites including frontal (F3, FZ, F4), frontal-central (FC3, FCZ, FC4) and central (C3, CZ, C4) electrode sites were assessed. The peak amplitudes and latencies were measured automatically between 250ms and 350ms and between 350ms and 700ms for the N2 and P3, respectively. For each stimulus type, i.e., Go and Nogo trials, using repeated ANOVA to analyzed these measures, with Group (younger and older adults) as a between-subjects variable and Emotional type (happy, neutral and sad faces) as a within-subjects variable. Behavioral results showed that the interaction of emotional type and group did not reach significant level in both Go and Nogo trials (accuracy: p > 0.05; reaction time: p > 0.05), which indicated that when participants respectively responded to happy, neutral and sad faces, there were no differences in terms of accuracy and reaction time. Thus, accuracy and reaction time were not effective indices that could be used to discern age differences in AER. The ERPs results showed: 1) Go-N2 amplitudes and latencies following happy and sad faces decreased more than those following neutral faces (amplitudes: p < 0.001; amplitudes: p < 0.001). Moreover, happy and sad faces prompted higher Nogo-P3 amplitudes and shorter Nogo-P3 latencies than neutral faces (amplitudes: p < 0.001; amplitudes: p < 0.001). These results indicated that emotional faces attract more attention than neutral faces. AER can modulate early ERPs components, and both Go-N2 and Nogo-P3 can be used as electrophysiological indices of AER. Go-N2 reflects top-down attention and Nogo-P3 overlaps with the automatic response inhibition of emotions. These results were consistent with previous studies. 2) In reaction to happy faces, the older group had higher Go/Nogo-P3 amplitudes than the younger group (p < 0.001); however, age differences in Go/Nogo-P3 latencies did not significant (p > 0.05). Conversely, the older group had higher Go/Nogo-P3 amplitudes and longer latencies than the younger group in reaction to sad faces (amplitudes: p < 0.001; latencies: p < 0.05), which showed that it was easier for the older to inhibit the automatic response to negative stimuli. In sum, these results suggested that there is AER in the emotional cued Go/Nogo task and there is the positive effect in older adults to some extent when they regulated emotions automatically. The ERPs has an advantage in studying AER. The present study provides an evident support to the positive effect in AER from the perspective of ERPs. Future research can increase the amounts of participants and explore theoretical basis to further investigate the aging effect of AER and its mechanism.

Key words: automatic emotion regulation, positive effect, event-related potentials (ERPs), emotion Go/Nogo task

摘要： 采用事件相关电位(ERPs)技术考察了老年人和青年人在自动化情绪调节上的差异。实验采用线索情绪Go/Nogo任务，分别记录了老年人和青年人对愉快、中性和悲伤面孔自动化加工的ERP数据。行为结果显示，在分别对愉快、中性和悲伤面孔加工时，老年组和青年组的反应时、正确率没有表现出年龄差异。ERPs结果显示：(1) 愉快面孔比中性面孔诱发出的Go-N2波幅较小，潜伏期较短；愉快面孔比中性面孔诱发出的Nogo-P3波幅较大，潜伏期较短，这表明情绪面孔比中性面孔更能吸引人们的注意；(2) 在愉快面孔上，老年组比青年组的Go/Nogo-P3波幅大、潜伏期差异不显著；在悲伤面孔上，老年组比青年组的Go/Nogo-P3波幅大，Nogo-P3潜伏期长，说明老年组比青年组更加抑制对悲伤面孔的反应。总的来讲，这些结果说明，自动化情绪调节存在于线索情绪Go/Nogo任务中，老年人在自动化情绪调节中表现出了一定程度的积极效应。

关键词: 自动化情绪调节, 积极效应, 事件相关电位, 线索Go/Nogo任务