Stopping anger and anxiety: Evidence that inhibitory ability predicts negative emotional responding

Abstract

Research has begun to suggest that cognitive ability contributes to emotional processes and responses. The present study sought novel evidence for this hypothesis by examining the relationship between individual differences in the capacity for inhibitory control and responses to a common emotion-induction procedure involving autobiographical memories. Participants first completed a stop-signal task to measure inhibitory control and then underwent an anger, anxiety, or neutral emotion induction. Performance on the stop-signal task predicted emotional responses such that participants with poorer inhibitory control reported larger increases in anger following the anger induction and larger increases in anxiety across emotion induction conditions, relative to better inhibitors. These results suggest that individual differences in cognitive ability may influence the intensity of emotional states induced by common laboratory methods of emotion induction.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Executive functioning
• Inhibition
• Reactivity
• Stop-signal task

Thank you to Kathryn Hernandez for helping to conduct this study and to Adrienne Crowell and Nicholas Kelley for providing helpful feedback on this work.

Thank you to Kathryn Hernandez for helping to conduct this study and to Adrienne Crowell and Nicholas Kelley for providing helpful feedback on this work.

Notes

¹ SSRT scores were not related to any baseline emotion self-report variables prior to the emotion induction, ps > .19.

² Visual inspection of the least squares regression lines in Figure 1b suggests that anxiety did not increase as a function of SSRT in the neutral condition. Indeed, the correlation between SSRT and anxiety residuals was non-significant in the neutral condition, p = .75.