The Influence Of Negative Emotion On Response Inhibition:Interference Vs Promotion?

Response inhibition means the ability to successfully prevent or suppress individuals'reactions that do not meet current needs in complex environment.It reflects individuals'flexible response and adaptation to the changing environment of the outside world and is important for the maintenance and development of daily life.Among a number of factors,the influence of negative emotion on response inhibition has become one of the research hotspots in recent years.However,existing studies have revealed inconsistent results.Among them,most studies found that negative emotion could interfere with the inhibition of response,which was due to the priority processing of negative emotion?deep processing?.In this process,the resources for performing response control was reduced,resulting interfering effect on the execution of response inhibition.At the same time,a small number of studies have found that negative emotion could promote response inhibition.It was because compared with neutral condition,negative emotion could effectively raise individual's wake-up level?high wake-up?,keeping individual's mind in the best state.In this case,the individual could recognize the stop signal more acutely and activate the stop task more quickly,thus promoting the execution of response inhibition.However,it has been uncertain under which condition would negative emotion have interference or promoting effect on response inhibition.By analyzing relevant literature,we found that the paradigms used in the existing research were quite different although they were all caled“emotional stop signal task”?eSST?.So,it was difficult to compare those different results.Previous researchers investigated the effect of negative emotion on response inhibition from unilateral factors?the interference effect of negative emotional processing or the promotion effect of negative emotional arousal?.Until now,there has been no study examining the relationship between negative emotion and response inhibition from the perspective of both sides and there has been no unified framework for the explaining of the influence of negative emotion on response inhibition.This current study intends to use the same experimental paradigm to investigate the influence of negative emotion on response inhibition by manipulating the relative magnitudes of the effect of negative processing and negative emotional arousal.Experiment one was a mixed design of 2?emotion type:negative vs neutral?×2?processing level:deep vs shallow?,in which the dependent variable was the stop signal reaction time?SSRT?.Negative and neutral face were used to induce corresponding type of emotion.Participants would complete a re-recognition task?they did not expect it beforehand?after finishing the emotional stop signal task?eSST?.The results showed that the main effect of emotion type was significant,F_?1,80?=3.273,p=0.074,?²=0.039.Compared with the neutral condition,SSRT was significant longer in negative condition,revealing an interference effect on the execution of response inhibition.The main effect of processing level and the interaction between the two variables were not significant?p>0.1?.Experiment one repeated the results of most previous studies?negative emotion interfered with response inhibition?.This may be because by using face materials in experiment one,the promoting effect of emotional arousal was smaler than the interference effect of emotional processing.In order to enhance the promotion effect of emotional arousal,scene pictures were used in experiment two.It was still a mixed design of 2?emotion type:negative vs neutral?×2?processing level:deep vs shalow?and the experimental task was the same as experiment one.The results showed that the main effect of the emotion type was significant,F_?1,74?=36.168,p<0.01,?²=0.328.Compared with the neutral condition,participants had a shorter SSRT in negative condition.The facilitation effect of negative emotion on response inhibition was found.The main effect of the processing level and the interaction effect were not significant?p>0.1?.By improving the arousal level of emotional materials,experiment two revealed a facilitation effect of negative emotion on response inhibition.However,whether this promotion effect would become larger if we continue to raise the level of emotional arousal was unclear.In order to explore the characteristics of the promoting effect of negative emotion,experiment three was conducted.Experiment three was a single factor design?emotion type:strong negative vs weak negative vs neutral?.In order to obtain a more sustained emotional arousal state,experiment 3 used block design paradigm,which means there was only one type of picture in each block.Participant's task was the same as that in experiment two.The results showed that the main effect of the emotion type was significant,F_?2,72?=3.239,p=0.045,?²=0.083.The post hoc comparison revealed that the facilitate effect of negative emotion on response inhibition shows a similar“inverted U-shaped”feature.Compared with the strong negative emotion,weak negative emotion revealed a greater effect.Combining participant's performance in the re-recognition task,we could know that in strong negative condition,it was also more difficult to suppress the processing of negative emotion although the wake-up level was enhanced.The promotion effect of strong negative emotion arousal was offset by the interference effect due to its deeper cognitive processing,which thus ultimately led to the behavioral results.Following conclusions could be drawn based on the results of our study:?1?The influence of negative emotion on response inhibition may be either interference or promotion.It depends on the relative size of the interference effect caused by negative emotion processing and the facilitate effect of negative emotion arousal.?2?The processing and awakening of negative emotion are not completely independent.They are likely to have a covariant relationship.?3?The facilitate effect of negative emotion on response inhibition shows a similar“inverted U-shaped”feature.Relative weak negative emotion could have a greater effect.This research was the first to examine the influence of negative emotion on response inhibition from both the interference effect of negative emotional processing and the promotion effect of negative emotional arousal.It reconciled the differences in previous research results and deepened the understanding of the mechanism of how negative emotion affect response inhibition.