Event Abstract Back to Event Following Erotic Stimuli, Cognitive Inhibitory Responses are Diminished in Sex Offenders but Enhanced in Healthy Controls Chi-Kuang Sun1*, Yu-Ying Chou2 and Eddie Harmon-Jones1 1 The University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Australia 2 The University of New South Wales, Research Associate, Australia Aims: Previous studies have indicated that emotion could both enhance and dampen task performance. Whether emotion enhances or dampens task performance may depend on whether individuals have particularly strong reactions to emotional stimuli. In the current study, we used event-related potential (ERP) to investigate the influence of emotional stimuli on inhibitory control in healthy individuals and sex offenders. Method: In each trial, the participants viewed one emotional picture (pleasant, unpleasant or neutral) passively and then made a series of five Go/No-Go decisions. In particular, the pleasant pictures were composed of erotic pictures and pictures of beautiful women. Results: Results indicated that during picture-viewing period, pleasant pictures elicited a larger late positive potential (LPP) than unpleasant pictures only in the sex offenders. In addition, during the Go/No-Go task, the healthy individuals had a smaller “No-Go minus Go” N2 in the emotion conditions compared to the neutral condition. However, the sex offenders had a larger No-Go N2 specifically in the pleasant condition. Conclusions: Taken together, these results suggest that the sex offenders may have stronger motivation and sustained attention toward the erotic stimuli, and as a consequence, their emotive response to these stimuli interfered with their inhibition. In contrast, for the healthy individuals, emotion was beneficial to inhibition. Overall, emotion benefited inhibitory control in healthy individuals but harmed it in sex offenders. Keywords: emotion, Inhibitory Control, event-related potential (ERP), late positive potential, N2 Conference: ASP2013 - 23rd Annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Wollongong, Australia, 20 Nov - 22 Nov, 2013. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Emotion Citation: Sun C, Chou Y and Harmon-Jones E (2013). Following Erotic Stimuli, Cognitive Inhibitory Responses are Diminished in Sex Offenders but Enhanced in Healthy Controls. Conference Abstract: ASP2013 - 23rd Annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.213.00015 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 25 Oct 2013; Published Online: 05 Nov 2013. * Correspondence: Mr. Chi-Kuang Sun, The University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Sydney, Australia, hikaru924@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Chi-Kuang Sun Yu-Ying Chou Eddie Harmon-Jones Google Chi-Kuang Sun Yu-Ying Chou Eddie Harmon-Jones Google Scholar Chi-Kuang Sun Yu-Ying Chou Eddie Harmon-Jones PubMed Chi-Kuang Sun Yu-Ying Chou Eddie Harmon-Jones Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.