Implicit angry faces interfere with response inhibition and response adjustment

ABSTRACT

Cognitive control enables people to adjust their thoughts and actions according to the current task demands. Response inhibition and response adjustment are two key aspects of cognitive control. Here, we examined how the implicit processing of emotional information influences these two functions with the help of the double-step saccade task. Each trial had either a single target or two sequential targets. Upon a single target onset, participants were required to make a quick saccade, but upon two target onsets, participants were instructed to inhibit their initial saccades and redirect their gaze to the second target. In three experiments, we manipulated the emotional information of the first and second targets. We found that irrelevant emotional information of the first target impaired response inhibition compared to non-emotional information (geometric shapes) of the first target. When non-emotional information (geometric shape) came as the first target, irrelevant angry emotional faces as the second target interfered with both response inhibition and response adjustment compared to irrelevant happy and neutral faces. We explain these results with previous findings that processing faces with irrelevant angry facial expressions take up many attentional resources, leaving fewer resources available for ongoing activities such as response inhibition and response adjustment.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• cognitive control
• response inhibition
• saccade
• angry
• happy

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the IRCC, IITB seed grant (RD/0518-IRCCSH0-013) to Prof. Gupta. We would like to thank Prof Pushpak Bhattacharya for access to the eye-tracker.

Additional information

Requests for materials should be addressed to S.P.

Author contributions

S.P. and R.G. conceived the experiment, S.P. conducted the experiment and analyzed the results. Both authors contributed to the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and/or analysed during the current study are available at https://osf.io/fp48r/?view_only=7e0c2e15052748769759f4fd150f1527

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the IRCC, IITB seed grant (RD/0518-IRCCSH0-013) to Prof. Gupta.