Abstract
Processing negative stimuli holds profound significance for survival,
yet excessive focus on this information can lead to poor social
adaptation. Trust violations, common occurrences in negative
interpersonal interactions, result in individuals allocating greater
cognitive resources towards processing negative stimuli. However, it is
still unclear how trust violations influence the ability to control
interference from negative stimuli. Therefore, this study employed the
Emotional Stroop paradigm (Experiment 1) and the cued Ultimatum game
(Experiment 2), using ERP technology to explore how trust violations
influence emotional interference control abilities. In Experiment 1, the
results showed that the violation group exhibited smaller SP amplitudes
in the negative interference condition compared to the no-interference
condition during the emotional Stroop paradigm. In Experiment 2, the
violation group exhibited smaller SP amplitudes when benign cues were
contaminated by threatening information relative to when they were not.
Moreover, the violation group displayed higher P3 amplitudes for
untrustworthy cues and angry faces than for trustworthy cues and happy
faces, respectively. These findings were not observed in the control
group. Collectively, these results suggest that trust violations not
only draw more cognitive resources towards processing negative stimuli
but also undermine interference control ability towards these stimuli.