The impact of trust violations on emotional interference control

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.