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As documented by Darwin 150 years ago, emotion expressed in human faces readily draws our attention and promotes sympathetic emotional reactions. How do such reactions to the expression of emotion affect our goal-directed actions? Despite the substantial advance made in the neural mechanisms of both cognitive control and emotional processing, it is not yet known well how these two systems interact. Here, we studied how emotion expressed in human faces influences cognitive control of conflict processing, spatial selective attention and inhibitory control in particular, using the Eriksen flanker paradigm. In this task, participants viewed displays of a central target face flanked by peripheral faces and were asked to judge the gender of the target face; task-irrelevant emotion expressions were embedded in the target face, the flanking faces, or both. We also monitored how emotion expression affects gender judgment performance while varying the relative timing between the target and flanker faces. As previously reported, we found robust gender congruency effects, namely slower responses to the target faces whose gender was incongruent with that of the flanker faces, when the flankers preceded the target by 0.1 s. When the flankers further advanced the target by 0.3 s, however, the congruency effect vanished in most of the viewing conditions, except for when emotion was expressed only in the flanking faces or when congruent emotion was expressed in the target and flanking faces. These results suggest that emotional saliency can prolong a substantial degree of conflict by diverting bottom-up attention away from the target, and that inhibitory control on task-irrelevant information from flanking stimuli is deterred by the emotional congruency between target and flanking stimuli.

The type and scale of disasters are changing with the changing social structures in modern society. Natural, social and human disasters occurred individually in the past, but the complexity and scale of these disasters have increased recently. As a result, National Disaster Management Institute (NDMI) has been operating the Smart Big Board (SBB) system to ensure effective real-time disaster management since June 2013. Based on Web GIS, this system can rapidly manage various types of information pertaining to disasters. However, it has not been able to satisfy all users because it was not developed keeping in mind the needs of service users. This study attempts to improve the SBB service using the service design methodology that is currently being widely used to improve public services. The service design process is conducted in accordance with the double diamond model, which utilizes a customer journey map to locate the contact point between user and service. This improved system is especially able to perform user customized disaster management in response to various and complex disaster types. If the improved system is applied to the national emergency management system through the business model design process, it will be able to effectively manage any future disasters.

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