ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Public Mental Health
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Role of Emotion Regulation in Adolescent Mental HealthView all 5 articles
Cognitive and Emotional Conflict control among Children Affected by Parental HIV/AIDS in China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Henan Kaifeng College of Science Technology and Communication, kaifeng, China
- 2Yellow River Water Conservancy Vocational and Technical College, Kaifeng, China
- 3Henan University, Kaifeng, China
- 4Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China
- 5University of South Carolina, Columbia, United States
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Children affected by parental HIV/AIDS constitute a particularly vulnerable population, often facing heightened risks in psychosocial adaptation due to family disruption, social stigma, and resource deprivation. However, the characteristics of their executive functions, particularly the core component of conflict monitoring, remain unclear. The present study compared the performance of children affected by parental HIV/AIDS (n=32) to a control group (n=32) on a cognitive conflict and emotional conflict face-word Stroop task. The results of the cognitive Stroop task demonstrated that both groups showed better performance in congruent stimuli compared to incongruent stimuli (86.20% vs.67.30% ; 568.43ms vs.586.04ms). In the emotional Stroop task, the control children displayed a significant interference effect both in the accuracy (85.70% vs. 70.70%) and reaction time (581.53ms vs. 597.98ms) to the incongruent condition compared to the congruent condition. However, the Stroop effect was absent in the children affected by parental HIV/AIDS. The children affected by parental HIV/AIDS can monitor cognitive conflicts, but show some deficits in monitoring emotional conflicts. In addition, the present findings suggest that the deficit of the emotional conflict control ability among the children affected by parental HIV/AIDS might be due to the fact that emotional stimuli occupy more cognitive resources in the emotional conflict monitoring process. Keywords: Children affected by parental HIV/AIDS; Cognitive conflict control; Emotional conflict control; Stroop task; China
Keywords: children affected by parental HIV/AIDS, China, Cognitive conflict control, emotional conflict control, Stroop task
Received: 08 Nov 2025; Accepted: 13 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Wang, Liu, Wen, Zhao, Zhao and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Wan Zhao
Junfeng Zhao
Xiaoming Li
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