Differences in Behavioral Inhibitory Control in Response to Angry and Happy Emotions Among College Students With and Without Suicidal Ideation: An ERP Study.

Lin Lin,Xia Wu,Chenxu Wang,Xuejun Bai,Yu Liu,Juanchan Mo,Ting Liu,Yunpeng Jiang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02191

Abstract

Suicidal ideation is one of the strongest predictors of suicide. A large number of studies have illustrated the important effect of impulsivity on suicidal ideation, and behavioral inhibitory control (BIC) is a specific manifestation of impulsivity. The goal of the present study is to evaluate the difference in BIC in response to happy and angry emotions between individuals with or without suicidal ideation to reveal the underlying mechanism of the effect of impulsivity on suicidal ideation when accounting for the effect of emotion. Combining the ERP technique and the two-choice oddball paradigm, a total of 70 college students were recruited to participate in this study. The Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation–Chinese Version was used to identify whether the participants had suicidal ideation. There were 30 participants in the risky-suicidal ideation (SI) group and 19 participants in the non-suicidal ideation (NSI) group. The results showed that the reaction time of the SI group was longer than that of the NSI group for happy emotions. At the electrophysiological level, the P3 amplitude of the NSI group was larger than that of the SI group regardless of the electrode sites and valence, and the P3 component elicited by angry faces was larger than those elicited by happy faces in the SI group. These findings suggest that individuals without suicidal ideation have better BIC, and the SI group has more difficulty controlling their responses to happy emotions than their responses to angry emotions.

Highlights

Suicidality is becoming a serious threat to the health of college students and has become the second leading cause of death among college students in recent years (Heron, 2017)
The well-established two-choice oddball paradigm improves upon the aforementioned shortcomings of the go/nogo task and reflects one of the most important components of impulsivity, i.e., the ability to suppress inappropriate actions and thoughts, which can be measured by behavioral inhibitory control (BIC) (Logan et al, 1997; Yuan et al, 2017)
The results showed an effect of electrode sites [F(2, 89) = 29.64, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.414], largest P3 amplitudes were recorded at parietal electrode sites, and all posterior sites displayed larger P3 than anterior sites, in which Pz site recorded the largest P3 amplitude and F1 site recorded the smallest; and an effect of group [F(1, 42) = 4.28, p = 0.045, η2p = 0.092], the difference wave of non-suicidal ideation (NSI) group (7.07 ± 0.87) was significantly larger that of Suicidal ideation (SI) group (4.80 ± 0.67) regardless of the electrode sites and valence

Summary

Introduction

Suicidality is becoming a serious threat to the health of college students and has become the second leading cause of death among college students in recent years (Heron, 2017). Barratt and Patton (1983) developed the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale to measure impulsivity. In addition to the self-report scale, a variety of tasks have been developed to assess impulsivity more objectively, such as the go/no-go task and the two-choice oddball paradigm. The well-established two-choice oddball paradigm improves upon the aforementioned shortcomings of the go/nogo task and reflects one of the most important components of impulsivity, i.e., the ability to suppress inappropriate actions and thoughts, which can be measured by behavioral inhibitory control (BIC) (Logan et al, 1997; Yuan et al, 2017). The two-choice oddball paradigm reflects the effect of BIC purely by subtraction between deviant and standard stimuli (Yuan et al, 2008a). In light of the aforementioned advantages, the two-choice oddball paradigm is adopted in this study

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Conclusion