Do emotional stimuli interfere with response inhibition? Evidence from the stop signal paradigm

Abstract

Participants performed a stop signal task in which an emotional picture preceded a neutral stimulus. They were asked to respond on the basis of the identity of the neutral stimulus unless an auditory tone was presented, in which case participants should try to withhold their response. In Experiment 1, we used positive, neutral and negative pictures. Results demonstrated that the presentation of an emotional stimulus prolonged both response and stopping latencies regardless of the valence of the emotional stimulus. This suggested that the degree of arousal could modulate the interference effect. In Experiment 2, high- and low-arousing pictures with a positive or negative valence were used. In line with the arousal hypothesis, high-arousal pictures interfered more with responding and stopping than low-arousing pictures whereas the valence of the pictures had little or no effect. These findings support the hypothesis that emotional stimuli interrupt ongoing cognitively controlled activities because they attract attention away from these ongoing activities.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Ernst Koster, Baptist Liefooghe, Bruno Verschuere, Nazanin Derakhshan and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frederick Verbruggen

Frederick Verbruggen is a fellow (grant no. 011D06102) of the Special Research Fund at Ghent University