Neural Features of Processing the Enforcement Phrases Used during Occupational Health and Safety Inspections: An ERP Study.
The appropriate enforcement phrases used during occupational health and safety (OHS) inspection activities is a crucial factor to guarantee the compliance with OHS regulations in enterprises. However, few researchers have empirically investigated the issue of how enforcement phrases are processed. The present study explored the neural features of processing two types of enforcement phrases (severe-and-deterrent vs. mild-and-polite phrases) used during OHS inspections by applying event-related potentials (ERP) method. Electroencephalogram data were recorded while the participants distinguished between severe-and-deterrent phrases and mild-and-polite phrases depicted in written Chinese words. The ERP results showed that severe-and-deterrent phrases elicited significantly augmented P300 amplitude with a central-parietal scalp distribution compared with mild-and-polite phrases, indicating the allocation of more attention resources to and elaborate processing of the severe-and-deterrent phrases. It reveals that humans may consider the severe-and-deterrent phrases as more motivationally significant and elaborately process the severity and deterrence information contained in the enforcement phrases for the adaptive protection. The current study provides an objective and supplementary way to measure the efficiency of different enforcement phrases at neural level, which may help generate appropriate enforcement phrases and improve the performance of OHS inspections.
Institute of Neural Management Sciences, Zhejiang University of TechnologyHangzhou, China; Neural Industrial Engineering Laboratory, Harbin Engineering UniversityHarbin, China; Neuromanagement Laboratory, Zhejiang UniversityHangzhou, China.
Qingguo
Q
Ma
Neural Industrial Engineering Laboratory, Harbin Engineering UniversityHarbin, China; Department of Business and Management, School of Economics and Management, Harbin Engineering UniversityHarbin, China.
Liping
L
Shi
Neuromanagement Laboratory, Zhejiang UniversityHangzhou, China; Department of Data Science and Engineering Management, School of Management, Zhejiang UniversityHangzhou, China.
Linfeng
L
Hu
Department of Business Administration, School of Economics, Liaoning University of TechnologyJinzhou, China; Department of Management Science and Engineering, School of Economics and Management, Harbin Engineering UniversityHarbin, China.
Qiang
Q
Liu
Neuromanagement Laboratory, Zhejiang University Hangzhou, China.
Zheng
Z
Yang
Neuromanagement Laboratory, Zhejiang UniversityHangzhou, China; Department of Data Science and Engineering Management, School of Management, Zhejiang UniversityHangzhou, China.
Qiuzhen
Q
Wang
P300; attention; event-related potentials; neuromanagement; occupational health and safety