Some cognitive and neuropsychological aspects of social inhibition and facilitation

Abstract

Tasks that, in the working memory and neuropsychological literature, have been related to executive and frontal processing, and nonexecutive and more posterior brain processing, bear distinct similarities with the kinds of tasks that, in the social psychological literature, have been associated with social inhibition and facilitation, respectively. Accordingly, a cognitive-neuropsychological model of social inhibition and facilitation is proposed whereby the presence of others engages the executive and frontal systems, and facilitates the function of systems active in more automatic, nonexecutive processing. In two experiments, the tasks most associated with executive and frontal processing (phonemic switches and answers to complex questions) showed evidence of social inhibition, whereas those more associated with nonexecutive and more posterior temporal processing (phonemic clusters and confidence–accuracy correlations), showed some evidence of social facilitation. Implications are discussed.

Notes

¹According to Troyer (2000), the total word score is the total number of words produced corrected for errors (i.e., proper names, repetitions, or repetitions of the same word with different endings). A phonemic cluster is defined as a number of words all beginning with the same two letters (such as FAR, FARM, and FATHER); or words that sound like each other because they rhyme (like SAND and STAND), differ by one vowel sound (like SAT, SEAT, and SIT), or are homonyms; i.e., they sound the same but have different spellings (like SOME and SUM). Clusters on semantic fluency consist of successively generated words belonging to the same subcategory (fruits, vegetables, meats, beverages, etc.). To calculate the mean cluster size the first word in any cluster is ignored (for example, the cluster size of a single word is zero). The number of switches is then the number of transitions between clusters. Errors and repetitions are included in the calculation of switches and clusters.

²As even most so-called “automatic” tasks, such as clustering, appear to demand some degree of executive or frontal processing (for example, to avoid repetition), one might also predict that these tasks too will eventually show impairment if the arousal is so extreme as to disrupt even the minimal amount of executive processing or frontal involvement necessary to perform the task. In other words, different tasks might have different “arousal curves”, depending on the degree of executive and related frontal processing required for optimal performance.