Dissociation of Neural Substrates of Response Inhibition to Negative Information between Implicit and Explicit Facial Go/Nogo Tasks: Evidence from an Electrophysiological Study

Abstract

BackgroundAlthough ample evidence suggests that emotion and response inhibition are interrelated at the behavioral and neural levels, neural substrates of response inhibition to negative facial information remain unclear. Thus we used event-related potential (ERP) methods to explore the effects of explicit and implicit facial expression processing in response inhibition.MethodsWe used implicit (gender categorization) and explicit emotional Go/Nogo tasks (emotion categorization) in which neutral and sad faces were presented. Electrophysiological markers at the scalp and the voxel level were analyzed during the two tasks.ResultsWe detected a task, emotion and trial type interaction effect in the Nogo-P3 stage. Larger Nogo-P3 amplitudes during sad conditions versus neutral conditions were detected with explicit tasks. However, the amplitude differences between the two conditions were not significant for implicit tasks. Source analyses on P3 component revealed that right inferior frontal junction (rIFJ) was involved during this stage. The current source density (CSD) of rIFJ was higher with sad conditions compared to neutral conditions for explicit tasks, rather than for implicit tasks.ConclusionsThe findings indicated that response inhibition was modulated by sad facial information at the action inhibition stage when facial expressions were processed explicitly rather than implicitly. The rIFJ may be a key brain region in emotion regulation.

Are you able not to react to what you hear? Inhibition behavior measured with an auditory Go/NoGo paradigm

“…These cues could trigger immediate and automatized behavioral reactions (like looking at the smartphone, etc.). This consideration is supported by results showing that the inhibition was affected by emotional, auditory, and visual stimuli compared with neutral ones (Albert, López-Martín, & Carretié, 2010;Ramos-Loyo, González-Garrido, García-Aguilar, & Del Río-Portilla, 2013;Yu et al, 2014;Yu et al, 2009). The idea of emotional valence effects could also be relevant for specific psychological/psychiatric disorders.…”

“…Based on Verdejo-García and Pérez-García (2007), we are interested in realizing a number of structural overlaps between the stimuli similar to complex real-life situations with different but connected cues, in order to design an auditory Go/NoGo paradigm with a comparable complexity as its visual equivalent. In both versions of the paradigm, stimuli with neutral attributes are used because emotional attributes may alter the amount of effort that participants invest (Yu et al, 2014;Yu, Yuan, & Luo, 2009).…”

“…Some studies have already shown that processing of emotional stimuli (Yu et al, 2014) and positive or negative auditory stimuli (Yu et al, 2009) need more cognitive effort than neutral ones. Gong et al (2012) and Lu et al (2014) emphasize that attributes in auditory stimuli like timbre, pitch, or intensity should be held as equal as possible when measuring inhibition behavior solely (Gong et al, 2012;Lu et al, 2014).…”

Multi-domain Features of the Non-phase-locked Component of Interest Extracted from ERP Data by Tensor Decomposition

“…All the participants were right-handed, presented with normal or corrected to normal visual acuity and they did not know or see the experimental paradigm before the experiment. Previous studies reported that anger appeared to be an important factor in human behavior (Denny and Siemer 2012) and the emotion Go/Nogo task was used in a great number of studies to explore the underlying mechanisms (Goldstein et al 2007;Shafritz et al 2006;Verona et al 2012;Yu et al 2014). Following this line, in this study, all participants were required to participate in emotion (Anger and Neutral) Go/Nogo task.…”

Go/NoGo continuous performance task in the psychophysiological research

“…In the traditional Go/NoGo CPT, participants are instructed to respond rapidly, generally with a button-press, to presentation of Go stimuli only, and response inhibition is measured by the ability to appropriately withhold responding to NoGo stimuli. Several variations of Go/NoGo stimuli have been used in various studies, for example the faces with emotions (Yu et al, 2014), coloured circles and geometric shapes (Thomalla et al, 2014), airplanes (as Go stimulus) and bombs (as a NoGo stimulus) (Rubia et al, 2001), numbers (Nelson et al, 1998), as well as the letters or its auditory modalities (Shucard et al, 2008). The example of test using Go/NoGo paradigm with letters stimuli is the Conners´Continuous Performance Test (CCPT).…”