The impact of emotion valence on brain processing of behavioral inhibitory control: Spatiotemporal dynamics

Emotion is known to interact with behavioral inhibitory control (BIC), an ability critical for adaptive living. Nevertheless, how emotion valence influences this control, and the spatiotemporal dynamics underlying this influence, remain undetermined. For this purpose, the present study recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) for a standard stimulus which required no BIC, and for deviant stimuli that required controlling habitual responses during pleasant, neutral and unpleasant blocks. Behavioral results showed prolonged reaction times (RTs) and diminished accuracy rates for deviant than for standard stimuli, irrespective of the emotionality of deviants. Moreover, there were significant main effects of stimulus type, and significant stimulus and emotion interaction effects on the averaged amplitudes of the 200-300 ms and 300-500 ms intervals. Through analyzing the deviant-standard difference ERPs that index BIC directly, we found larger N2 and smaller P3 amplitudes during the unpleasant block than during the neutral block. The pleasant block, in contrast, showed a trend of more pronounced P3 amplitudes than the neutral block. Thus, by synchronizing BIC with emotion induction, we found distinct impact of pleasant and unpleasant emotions on behavioral inhibitory processing, not only in early monitoring of response conflicts but also in the late stage of response inhibition.

► Pleasant and unpleasant emotions influenced each stage of BIC distinctly, when emotion induction was synchronized with BIC performance. ► Negative emotion intensified response conflicts monitoring. ► Negative emotion intensified inhibitory control processing during late stage. ► Pleasant emotion impacted behavioral inhibitory control (BIC) processing to a lesser extent.