Henry Berger, “Comparing Inhibitory Control: Emotional vs. Neutral Stop Signal Tasks”
Mentor: Han Joo Lee, Psychology
Poster #103
Response inhibition (RI; the ability to stop an unwanted ongoing response) has historically been studied utilizing only non-emotional stimuli. Current literature needs a direct comparison of RI using emotional vs. neutral stimuli. To better understand how RI is affected by emotionally charged, real-world conditions, compared to dry, neutral conditions we are implementing the traditional Stop Signal Task (SST; standard tool of RI assessment) along with an Emotional Stop Signal Task (ESST; modified version of the SST). In an online study, 250 participants will complete self-report measures of experienced symptoms relating to several psychological disorders and complete three Stop Signal Tasks: utilizing neutral stimuli (neutral face), utilizing emotional stimuli (angry face) of the same modality and context as the neutral face task, and a control task utilizing neutral stimuli (upward arrow). We expect to find a significant increase in stop signal reaction times (SSRT; the primary index of RI deficit in the SST and ESST) in the emotional condition, indicating more pronounced difficulty in RI. Error commission and omission rates thus far have been higher than expected overall, but more so with the emotional task than neutral, further indicating decreased inhibition ability in the emotional condition. We hypothesize a decrease in RI with participants reporting experiencing clinical symptoms compared to those reporting no symptoms, demonstrating larger deficits in RI when symptoms are greater in number and/or severity. These results would suggest that much of the previous work on RI using only the neutral SST, although in-depth and informative, can shed limited light on the true experience of people’s inhibition abilities in the real world.