The Divergent Effects of Fear and Disgust on Inhibitory Control: An ERP Study

Negative emotional stimuli have been shown to attract attention and impair executive control. However, two different types of unpleasant stimuli, fearful and disgusting, are often inappropriately treated as a single category in the literature on inhibitory control. Therefore, the present study aimed...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2015-06, Vol.10 (6), p.e0128932-e0128932
Main Authors: Xu, Mengsi, Li, Zhiai, Ding, Cody, Zhang, Junhua, Fan, Lingxia, Diao, Liuting, Yang, Dong
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Analysis
Attention - physiology
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Brain research
Cognition & reasoning
Education
Electroencephalography - methods
Emotions
Enterprise resource planning
Event-related potentials
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Executive function
Facial Expression
Fear
Fear - physiology
Female
Go/no-go discrimination learning
Humans
Information processing
Inhibition (psychology)
Laboratories
Male
Perceptions
Personality
Photic Stimulation - methods
Psychology
Stimuli
Studies
Young Adult
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Summary:Negative emotional stimuli have been shown to attract attention and impair executive control. However, two different types of unpleasant stimuli, fearful and disgusting, are often inappropriately treated as a single category in the literature on inhibitory control. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the divergent effects of fearful and disgusting distracters on inhibitory control (both conscious and unconscious inhibition). Specifically, participants were engaged in a masked Go/No-Go task superimposed on fearful, disgusting, or neutral emotional contexts, while event-related potentials were measured concurrently. The results showed that for both conscious and unconscious conditions, disgusting stimuli elicited a larger P2 than fearful ones, and the difference waves of P3 amplitude under disgusting contexts were smaller than that under fearful contexts. These results suggest that disgusting distracters consume more attentional resources and therefore impair subsequent inhibitory control to a greater extent. This study is the first to provide electrophysiological evidence that fear and disgust differently affect inhibitory control. These results expand our understanding of the relationship between emotions and inhibitory control.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0128932