The Positive Effects Of Unconscious Goals Of Impulsivity Control On Behavioral Inhibitiory Control

Behavioral Inhibitory Control(BIC)plays an important role in human’s daily life,it reflects the ability to inhibit inappropriate and impulsive behavior.As an important form of impulsivity,BIC is considered as a prerequisite for making the right choice,and its dysfunction is thought to be linked to violent,aggressive or suicidal behaviors.Although BIC has been widely studied,the research on how to improve the ability of BIC is still insufficient.The research on the unconscious goal shows that unconscious goal prompting task can guide the individual’s goal pursuit behavior below the level of consciousness by forming the connection between environmental cues and goal representation in the brain.This suggests that the unconscious goal of impulsivity control may help to improve the individual’s ability of BIC.Moreover,the effect of negative emotions on self-control is considered to be one of the most important effects of emotions on cognition,and it is ubiquitous in our daily life.If unconscious goals can indeed help individuals improve their performance in BIC task,it is also need to be explored that whether such positive effects are still effective under the influence of negative emotions.The whole study is divided into two parts.The first study is to investigate whether unconscious goals can be used to improve BIC ability.In the second study,emotional induction was added to explore whether unconscious goals can still help individuals improve their BIC performance under the influence of negative emotions.In study 1,72 male undergraduates from Southwest University were assigned to three priming conditions: Impulsivity Avoidance(IA)group,Calmness Pursuit(CP)group and Control group.IA group and CP group were instructed to complete different sentence unscrambling tasks to activate the unconscious goal of impulsivity control.In the first study,the accuracy cost(ACC cost,frequent stimulus-infrequent stimulus)of both Go/Nogo task and Two-choice Oddball task were used to evaluate the BIC performance before and after unconscious priming,as well as the unique reaction time cost(RT cost,infrequent stimulus-frequent stimulus)of Two-choice Oddball task.The results showed that the ACC cost increased in the post-test of both Go/Nogo task and Two-choice Oddball task,which was mainly manifested as the main effect of time.Further analysis reveals that this was due to the significant increase of ACC cost in the post-test of Control group,while no similar phenomenon was found in IA group and CP group.Although the interaction between time and groups was not found in the analysis of ACC cost in both Go/Nogo task and Two-choice Oddball task,the interaction between groups and time was significant in the analysis of RT cost in Two-choice Oddball task.For IA group,there was no significant difference in RT cost between pre-test and post-test,while the RT cost of CP group and Control group were significantly increased in the post-test compared with the pre-test.These results suggest that unconscious goal pursuit helps to prevent impulsive responses,and IA goal is more effective than CP goal.Moreover,according to the Muraven’ strength model,the decline in BIC performance in the post-test may be due to the temporary depletion of cognitive resources,so the positive influence of unconscious goals is manifested as blocking the decline in BIC performance rather than promoting it.In addition,RT cost of Two-choice Oddball task is a more sensitive indicator than the traditional ACC cost in the evaluation of BIC ability.In the second study,61 male undergraduates from Southwest University were randomly assigned to the Experimental group,Negative control group and Neutral control group.The standard evaluated negative valence film episode and neutral valence film episode are used for emotional induction.The Experimental group and Negative control group received negative emotional induction,while the Neutral control group received neutral emotional induction.Two-choice Oddball task was used to measure the change of BIC ability before and after unconscious goal priming task.The participants in the Experimental group were asked to complete the sentence unscrambling task priming the impulsivity avoidance goal,while the two control groups completed the sentence unscrambling task that was unrelated to the goal.The PANAS scale was used to measure the validity and duration of emotion induction after the pre-test and the post-test of behavioral inhibitory control.The results of PANAS scale analysis showed that in the pre-test,the Experimental group and the Negative control group scored significantly higher in negative items than the neutral control group.Therefore,it can be considered that the operation of emotional induction is effective.Repeated measurement ANOVA was performed for BIC tasks,and no statistically significant effect was found in ACC cost analysis.However,paired t-test was performed on the three groups respectively,and it was found that the difference of ACC cost in the posttest of the experimental group was significantly decreased,while there was no significant difference between the negative control group and the neutral control group in the post-test and the pre-test.It was found in RT cost analysis that the RT costs of Experimental group and Negative control group were significantly higher than that of Neutral control group in pre-test,which was consistent with the pre-test results of PANAS scale.In the post-test,the RT costs of Negative control group and Neutral control group increased significantly,and only the RT cost of Experimental group maintained the original level.Pairwise comparison showed that there was no significant difference in RT cost between Experimental group and Neutral control group,but there was a significant difference in RT cost between Negative control group and Neutral control group in the post-test.These results show that negative emotional induction does have an interference effect on BIC,which is reflected in the increase of RT cost,while the positive influence of impulsivity control of unconscious goal effectively prevents the decline of BIC performance.Combining the results of the two studies,the unconscious goal of impulsivity control has a positive effect on BIC.Even when disturbed by negative emotions,unconscious goals can guide individuals to achieve goals at the unconscious level.In addition,RT cost of Two-choice Oddball task was more sensitive than traditional ACC cost as an indicator of BIC ability.As a way that does not consume much cognitive resources and subjective efforts,unconscious goal may be of positive significance in helping people with BIC deficits to improve their BIC ability.