Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry: Volitional choices to act or inhibit are modulated by subliminal perception of emotional faces

Abstract

Volitional action and self-control-feelings of acting according to one's own intentions and in being control of one's own actions-are fundamental aspects of human conscious experience. However, it is unknown whether high-level cognitive control mechanisms are affected by socially salient but nonconscious emotional cues. In this study, we manipulated free choice decisions to act or withhold an action by subliminally presenting emotional faces: In a novel version of the Go/NoGo paradigm, participants made speeded button-press responses to Go targets, withheld responses to NoGo targets, and made spontaneous, free choices to execute or withhold the response for Choice targets. Before each target, we presented emotional faces, backwards masked to render them nonconscious. In Intentional trials, subliminal angry faces made participants more likely to voluntarily withhold the action, whereas fearful and happy faces had no effects. In a second experiment, the faces were made supraliminal, which eliminated the effects of angry faces on volitional choices. A third experiment measured neural correlates of the effects of subliminal angry faces on intentional choice using EEG. After replicating the behavioural results found in Experiment 1, we identified a frontal-midline theta component-associated with cognitive control processes-which is present for volitional decisions, and is modulated by subliminal angry faces. This suggests a mechanism whereby subliminally presented Bthreat^stimuli affect conscious control processes. In summary, nonconscious perception of angry faces increases choices to inhibit, and subliminal influences on volitional action are deep seated and ecologically embedded.Keywords Cognitive control . Decision-making . Emotion . ERP . PrimingHealthy adult individuals experience volitional control over many of their actions. This notion is fundamental to most conceptions of morality and responsibility. Voluntary control allows the individual to implement reasoned and flexible goaloriented action rather than being constantly enslaved by automatic responses to the external environment (Shadlen & Gold, 2004). While volitional production of actions has been long studied (e.g., Libet, Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983), not much attention has been given to volitional self-control and the role of inhibition in volition (but see Filevich, Kühn, & Haggard, 2012;Parkinson & Haggard, 2014, 2015.Some forms of self-control can be considered tonic-or long lasting-such as refraining from a substance of abuse. This is often colloquially referred to as Bwillpower ( Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998;Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). Other forms focus on more immediate and transient moments of self-control-the notion of Bstopping oneself from doing something at the last moment^-which we call intentional inhibition (Filevich et al., 2012;Parkinson & Haggard, 2014). As an everyday example, consider refraining from shouting at a loved one whilst in anger. Experimentally we define this as endogenously cancelling ...

“Free won’t” after a beer or two: chronic and acute effects of alcohol on neural and behavioral indices of intentional inhibition

“…There have been several attempts to study intentional inhibition using varieties of the Libet task [18], the Marble Task [19], and the modified go/no-go task [20,21]. To investigate intentional inhibition, these tasks usually included a free-choice condition, where participants were encouraged to act/inhibit voluntarily and roughly equally across all the trials.…”

“…Only a few studies have investigated the neural mechanisms of intentional inhibition using EEG [20,21,[77][78][79][80]. Tasks in those studies were suboptimal in terms of 1) the choice between acting and withholding is relatively arbitrary; 2) pre-decision on whether and when to inhibit cannot be excluded; 3) perhaps tapping into selective choice rather than inhibition, especially when equiprobable go and no-go trials are used [77,78].…”

Amplified engagement of prefrontal cortex during control of voluntary action in Tourette syndrome

“…Hair and peripheral features were removed by applying a greyscale circle, leaving only the facial expression. The face primes, presented for 16 ms, were preceded by a scrambled face 'forward mask' (32ms), followed by a scrambled face 'backward mask' (48ms), to render the face prime consciously imperceptible (Parkinson et al, 2017). Participants were not informed of the face primes before or during the experiment.…”

“…Insula is also active during 'whether' decisions to act or to withhold (Brass and Haggard, 2010), suggesting this region may also cue such motor decisions. We therefore included within our task design a subliminal priming element (Parkinson et al, 2017). We hypothesised that unconscious facial primes might differentially cue 'Choose' decisions to act or to withhold responses through effects on insular activation.…”

Impact of cardiac interoception cues on voluntary decisions to make or withhold action in an intentional inhibition task

“…There were 400 trials in total: 200 were Go trials (50%), 66 NoGo (16.5%), and 134 Choose (33.5%). The higher frequency of Go trials was designed to invoke a prepotent tendency to go, as in traditional Go/NoGo tasks, so that withholding on the NoGo trials was sufficiently challenging to invoke reactive inhibitory control (Chambers et al, 2009;Parkinson et al, 2017;Swick et al, 2011). 50% of each trial type were delivered at cardiac systole, and 50% at diastole.…”