Development of Neural Mechanisms in Emotional Conflict Adaptation: A Comparison of Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults

Objective: This study explored behavioral and electrophysiological age-related changes in conflict adaptation to emotional stimuli among children, adolescents, and young adults. Method: Children (N = 35, M-age = 10.72 years), adolescents (N = 35, M-age = 13.34 years), and young adults (N = 30, M-age = 21.82 years) were administered cognitive control tasks on emotional stimulus-stimulus (S-S) conflict and stimulus-response (S-R) conflict while event-related potential (ERP) signals were recorded. Results: The behavioral results (response time [RT] and error rate) showed that all age groups exhibited reliable conflict adaptation effect (CAE) to emotional stimuli, and conflict adaptation performance improved with age. A similar developmental pattern was observed when the ERP magnitudes of the CAE to emotional stimuli (N2 amplitude, N2 latency, and early P3 latency) were compared. Participants performed better on conflict adaptation to emotional S-S stimuli when compared with the S-R stimuli (RT-CAE, N2 amplitude-CAE and late P3 amplitude-CAE), and only children performed better conflict adaptation to emotional S-S stimuli than on S-R stimuli in terms of error rates. Conclusion: Children, adolescents, and young adults all presented reliable behavioral and electrophysiological conflict adaptation to emotional stimuli, and participants exhibited improved performance on conflict adaptation with age across the 3 age groups in emotional contexts. Moreover, all the age groups showed distinct cognitive control of emotional S-S and S-R conflict, and conflict adaptation to emotional S-S stimuli may mature earlier than S-R conflict. This study offers insight into how the processing of emotional stimuli affects cognitive control processes from a developmental perspective. This is the first study to explore behavioral and electrophysiological age-related changes in conflict adaptation to emotional stimuli among children, adolescents, and young adults. The present study offers insight into how the processing of emotional stimuli affects cognitive processes from a developmental perspective.