The Divergent Effects Of Disgust And Fear On Inhibitory Control

Emotion and executive control play essential roles in our daily life and affect our behavior. Inhibitory control which respects the ability of depressing the inappropriate behavior in some condition is one of the most important part of executive control. The impacts of emotion on inhibitory control have always been the focus of psychological research. People with strong ability of response inhibition can successfully depress the inappropriate behavior and well adapt to the environment. Previous research mainly focused on the impacts of emotional stimuli on various executive control ability such as working memory, task switching and conflict monitoring. However, the effects of emotional stimuli especially the negative emotional stimuli on inhibitory control are currently scarce. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore the effects of negative emotional stimuli on inhibitory control.Varieties of studies had shown that negative emotions are related to survival, so they have the superior level of information processing. According to this, dual to the cognitive resources are limited, when the inhibitory control is under the negative emotional environment, inhibitory control will be hindered by the negative emotion. Therefore, the first purpose of our study was trying to investigate whether negative emotion may hinder the inhibitory control. Furthermore, previous studies’ classifications of emotions were mostly the positive, negative or neutral stimuli on the basics of emotional valence. Nevertheless, some lately studies had found that fear, disgust or sadness which are not the same types of negative emotion have different impacts on attention, perception or memory. Therefore, the second purpose of our study was trying to explore the different effects of fear and disgust stimuli on inhibitory control. Besides, we tried to explain the difference on neural mechanisms.In this study, participants were instructed to finish the stop-signal task superimposed on emotional cues. Specifically, in Experiment 1, we set the cues of neural and negative emotional pictures according to the previous studies. We recorded and compared the SSRT(stop signal reaction time, go reaction time minuses SSD) under two types of emotional pictures. The aim of this experiment was to explore whether negative emotion may hinder the inhibitory control. In Experiment 2,on the basis of Experiment 1,we further separated the negative emotion into disgust and fear stimuli and investigated whether they exerted different influence on inhibitory control. In Experiment 3,the ERP was used to explain different impacts of disgust and fear on neural mechanisms. According to the previous studies,first of all,we hypothesized that negative stimuli would impair inhibitory control.Then we hypothesized that compared with fearful stimuli,disgusting stimuli would impair inhibitory control,with smaller P3 waves.Results of the Experiment 1 showed that, negative stimuli would hinder the inhibitory control compared with the neutral stimuli with a longer SSRT. Furthermore, Experiment 2 showed that disgusting and fearful stimuli have different impacts on inhibitory control. Disgusting stimuli would worse inhibitory control performance on behavior level with longer SSRT compared with neutral and fearful stimuli. Disgusting stimuli would elicit smaller P3 waves which indicate worse inhibitory control ability. All of these results suggested that disgust and fear have divergent effects on earlier stages such as attention and perception, therefore caused different results on later executive control. These results expand the understanding of the relationship between emotions and inhibitory control and emphasize the importance of the emotional discrete approach theory.