Response inhibition negatively impacts subsequent hedonic evaluations of motivationally relevant stimuli and reduces the behavioral incentive to seek and obtain such items. Here we expand the investigation of the motivational consequences of inhibition by presenting sexually appealing and nonappealing images in a go/no-go task and a subsequent image-viewing task. Each initially obscured image in the viewing task could either be made more visible or less visible by repeatedly pressing different keys. Fewer key presses were made to obtain better views of preferred-sex images when such images had previously been inhibited as no-go items than when previously encountered as noninhibited go items. This finding replicates prior results and is consistent with the possibility that motor-response suppression has lingering effects that include global reductions in all behavioral expression. However, for nonpreferred images, prior inhibition resulted in more key presses to obscure their visibility than when such images had not been inhibited. This novel finding suggests that the motivational consequences of response inhibition are not due to a global brake on action but are instead linked to negative changes in stimulus value that induce corresponding increases in avoidance and decreases in approach.

The effects of mild dehydration during ice hockey are well-studied in males, but not females. In a randomized, crossover design 11 female varsity hockey players drank no fluid (1.7±0.3% body mass loss) or water to maintain hydration during simulated-hockey exercise. Core temperature (P<0.01) and perceived fatigue (P=0.02) were higher and sprint power lower (P<0.01) when mildly dehydrated. Thus, mild dehydration may impair hockey performance and thermoregulation while increasing perceived fatigue in females. • Female stop-and-go sport athletes may benefit their in-game sprint performance and thermoregulation by following personalized in-game hydration to prevent becoming mildly dehydrated.

Social pain is often associated with social rejection and shares neural correlates with the bothersome aspect of physical pain, which may also indicate an overlap in function. Pain has been described as a motivational signal to respond to the source of the pain in an adaptive way, such as by altering behavior. We tested whether social pain causes similarly adaptive alterations in behavior. Participants played computerized ball-tossing tasks with putative players-one who passed to and one who excluded the participant from play-in both a social and nonsocial version. We assessed the behavioral consequences of social pain by comparing the number of throws to each stimulus (social rejector vs. nonsocial rejector) over the course of the task. Posttask questionnaires assessed subjective feelings of social pain. A decrease in throws to the rejecting stimulus was only observed in the social version, indicating that rejection that is social in nature leads to change in behavior. Moreover, participants reported more negative feelings toward the rejecting stimulus in the social than in the nonsocial version. These subjective feelings of social pain mediated the effect of version of the game (social vs. nonsocial) on changes in behavior, indicating that social pain from social rejection causes changes in behavior.

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