People rapidly and spontaneously form trustworthiness impressions based on facial appearance. Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging find that activity in the amygdala and other brain regions tracks with face trustworthiness, even when participants are not explicitly asked to judge face trustworthiness. The current study investigated whether it would be possible to detect implicit responses using another method: fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS). While scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded, participants viewed sequences of faces in which a single base face was presented at a rate of 6 Hz and oddball faces with different identities were presented every fifth face (6 Hz/5 = 1.2 Hz). Within a given sequence, the oddball faces were all either less trustworthy-looking or trustworthy-looking. The base face either matched the oddball faces on trustworthiness or did not match, so that the experiment had a 2 (trustworthiness of oddball) × 2 (match between base/oddball faces) design. Although participants’ task was unrelated to the faces, the trustworthiness of the oddball faces had a strong influence on the response at 1.2 Hz and its harmonics. There was a stronger response for sequences with less trustworthy- versus trustworthy-looking oddball faces over bilateral occipitotemporal sites, medial occipital sites, and beyond. In contrast, the match in trustworthiness between the base face and the oddball faces had only a minimal effect. The effect of oddball type was observed after a short recording time, suggesting that FPVS offers an efficient means of capturing implicit neural responses to face trustworthiness.

Performance on an emotional stop-signal task designed to assess emotional response inhibition has been associated with Negative Urgency and psychopathology, particularly self-injurious behaviors. Indeed, difficulty inhibiting prepotent negative responses to aversive stimuli on the emotional stop-signal task (i.e. poor negative emotional response inhibition) partially explains the association between Negative Urgency and non-suicidal self-injury. Here, we combine existing data sets from clinical (hospitalised psychiatric inpatients) and non-clinical (community/student participants) samples aged 18–65 years ( N = 450) to examine the psychometric properties of this behavioural task and evaluate hypotheses that emotional stop-signal task metrics relate to distinct impulsive traits among participants who also completed the UPPS-P ( n = 223). We specifically predicted associations between worse negative emotional response inhibition (i.e. commission errors during stop-signal trials representing negative reactions to unpleasant images) and Negative Urgency, whereas commission errors to positive stimuli – reflecting worse positive emotional response inhibition – would relate to Positive Urgency. Results support the emotional stop-signal task’s convergent and discriminant validity: as hypothesised, poor negative emotional response inhibition was specifically associated with Negative Urgency and no other impulsive traits on the UPPS-P. However, we did not find the hypothesised association between positive emotional response inhibition and Positive Urgency. Correlations between emotional stop-signal task performance and self-report measures were the modest, similar to other behavioural tasks. Participants who completed the emotional stop-signal task twice ( n = 61) additionally provide preliminary evidence for test–retest reliability. Together, findings suggest adequate reliability and validity of the emotional stop-signal task to derive candidate behavioural markers of neurocognitive functioning associated with Negative Urgency and psychopathology.

Eating disorder (ED) symptoms often co-occur with non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). This comorbidity is consistent with evidence that trait negative urgency increases risk for both of these phenomena. We previously found that impaired late-stage negative emotional response inhibition (i.e., negative emotional action termination or NEAT) might represent a neurocognitive mechanism for heightened negative urgency among people with NSSI history. The current study evaluated whether relations between negative urgency and ED symptoms similarly reflect deficits in this neurocognitive process. A total of 105 community adults completed an assessment of ED symptoms, negative urgency, and an emotional response inhibition task. Results indicated that, contrary to predictions, negative urgency and NEAT contributed independent variance to the prediction of ED symptoms, while controlling for demographic covariates and NSSI history. Worse NEAT was also uniquely associated with restrictive eating, after accounting for negative urgency. Our findings suggest that difficulty inhibiting ongoing motor responses triggered by negative emotional reactions (i.e., NEAT) may be a shared neurocognitive characteristic of ED symptoms and NSSI. However, negative urgency and NEAT dysfunction capture separate variance in the prediction of ED-related cognitions and behaviors, distinct from the pattern of results we previously observed in NSSI.Brain Sci. 2020, 10, 104 2 of 17 of diverse self-injurious behaviors [12][13][14][15][16] and a putative non-specific marker of general vulnerability for psychopathology [17,18]. Consistent with this notion, the most commonly reported function of NSSI and ED behaviors is to reduce negative affect [19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. Ecological momentary assessment corroborates the idea that direct and indirect self-injury are both motivated by a desire to alleviate unpleasant emotional states, as increased negative affect proximally predicts episodes of NSSI, dysregulated eating, and compensatory behaviors [26][27][28][29][30][31][32].Much like emotion dysregulation, impulsivity is implicated in various psychiatric disorders and self-injurious behaviors. This multifaceted construct encompasses several subfactors, including impulsive personality traits and impulsive behavior, or motor impulsivity. Impulsive behavior can be further divided into impulsive action and impulsive choice, which reflect inhibitory control and decision-making deficits, respectively. Impaired inhibitory control and consequently, impulsive action, are aspects of altered neurocognition broadly involved in suicidal thoughts and behaviors [12]. Impulsive personality traits, especially negative urgency, are also associated with NSSI [11,[33][34][35][36] and dysregulated eating [36][37][38][39][40]. Negative urgency is a transdiagnostic personality characteristic that refers to individual differences in the tendency to act impulsively in response to negative affect [41]. Heightened negative urgency among people who engage in self-injurious behaviors s...

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