Impairments in inhibition or cognitive control in psychological disorders

Contributions to this special issue of Applied & Preventive Psychology richly elucidate connections between a variety of psychological disorders and performance in a number of tasks that are used to reason about inhibitory deficits. This commentary calls attention to the different uses of the concept of inhibition – vernacular, neural, operational, and theoretical – and suggests that the term cognitive control avoids claims about dampened memory representations that are difficult to support. Central findings from the reviews are summarized; evidence concerning suppression-induced forgetting is featured and directions to foster application are discussed.