Abstract
Emotional stimuli interfere with other kinds of stimuli processing because they capture attentional resources in accordance with their adaptive importance. This suggests that it would be more difficult to inhibit emotional faces than neutral ones or objects. The present study evaluates the effects of facial emotional expressions on inhibitory processing using event-related brain potentials in a Go/NoGo paradigm. Event-related potentials were obtained in healthy subjects during emotional inhibition tasks involving anger and happiness, compared to non-emotional tasks based on simple objects and gender. Emotional tasks exhibited poorer performance than non-emotional ones. P3 latencies were longer during response inhibition to emotional faces than those obtained while inhibiting non-emotional stimuli. This study provides evidence that facial emotional content interferes with response inhibition since it may elicit additional neural resource demands.
Highlights
Every day, people are embedded in social relationships where recognizing facial emotional expressions is crucial for understanding the reactions and intentions of others
The percentage of correct inhibitions was significantly different among tasks (F(3,45) = 9.81, p < 0.001) as it was higher for the objects than for anger and happiness (p < 0.01) and higher for gender than both anger (p < 0.01) and happiness (p < 0.03)
P3 latencies were longer during response inhibition to emotional faces than those obtained while inhibiting non-emotional stimuli
Summary
People are embedded in social relationships where recognizing facial emotional expressions is crucial for understanding the reactions and intentions of others In this context, the human brain has developed mechanisms to identify emotional faces more quickly and accurately than other types of objects (Ro, Russell, & Lavie, 2001). Using a stop-signal paradigm, Verbruggen and De Houwer (2007) found that the level of arousal portrayed in emotional pictures is more important in inhibitory processing than their valence. They suggest that emotional stimuli interrupt ongoing cognitively-controlled activities by diverting attention from them. It is clear that emotions have an important effect on cognitive processes, including inhibition which is the main focus of the present study
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