Less approach, more avoidance: Response inhibition has motivational consequences for sexual stimuli that reflect changes in affective value not a lingering global brake on behavior

Abstract

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.

Response inhibition negatively impacts social-emotional evaluations of specific individuals

“…This is important in the social domain because eliciting negative affect in others makes people susceptible to social exclusion (e.g., Driscoll, Barclay & Fenske, 2017). Indeed, we have shown that prior inhibition associated with images of previously-unfamiliar people negatively biases evaluative choices away from those individuals (Fenske et al, 2005) and both reduces behavioural approach toward associated social stimuli (Ferrey et al, 2012;Driscoll et al, 2018) and increases behavioural avoidance of them (Driscoll et al, 2018).…”

“…Ignoring or withholding motor-responses from face or whole-body images of unfamiliar people can negatively impact subsequent social evaluations of those people, an effect attributed to the propensity of inhibition to affectively devalue associated stimuli (Dickert & Slovic, 2013;Doallo et al, 2012;Driscoll et al, 2018;Fenske et al, 2005;Ferrey et al, 2012;Frischen et al, 2012;Goolsby, Shapiro, Silvert et al, 2009;Kiss et al, 2008;Martiny-Huenger et al, 2014;Raymond et al, 2005). However, because prior studies have so-far only ever utilized attentional-or response-inhibition tasks (e.g., attention: visual search; response: Go/No-go) that require category-level discrimination of the to-be-ignored/no-response items from the targets of attention/response, it has remained unclear whether inhibition and the corresponding social devaluation is solely triggered and associated with category-level representations of the to-be-ignored/no-response individuals according to their membership in a particular socially-relevant group or a shared perceptual feature, or can also be mediated by itemlevel representations in memory.…”

“…Inhibition and the corresponding social devaluation in these studies may have therefore been triggered and associated with category-level representations of the to-be-ignored/no-response individuals according to their membership in a particular socially-relevant group (male/female: asian/cacausian: Doallo et al, 2012;Kiss et al, 2008;in-group/out-group: Martiny-Huenger et al, 2014;light-haired/dark-haired: Driscoll et al, 2018;Ferrey et al, 2012) or a shared perceptual feature (e.g., colour of a semi-transparent overlay appearing over each face stimulus: red/green, Fenske et al, 2005; blue/yellow, Kiss et al, 2007;Goolsby, Shapiro, Silvert, et al, 2009). And this may explain why the socialemotional consequences of attention-and response-related inhibition have so far been found to not only impact evaluations of the specific items encountered in the inhibition-based tasks (Driscoll et al, 2018;Fenske et al, 2005;Ferrey et al, 2012;Kiss et al, 2008;Martiny-Huenger et al, 2014), but to also generalize to impact affective responses to other previously-unseen stimuli that belong to the same category or that have the same defining feature as a previously-inhibited item (Driscoll et al, 2018;Ferrey et al, 2012;Goolsby, Shapiro, Silvert, et al, 2009). There is a long history of research that suggests that the formation of impressions that drive social behaviour is, at least at first, primarily dominated by category-level information (e.g., Allport, 1954;Devine, 1989;Fiske & Neuberg, 1990).…”

“…Of these, 84 participants reached or exceeded the initial learning criteria and then completed the Go/No-go and Social-emotional Evaluation tasks. This resulted in final sample size (N = 84) that was in line with a calculation using G*Power (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007), which indicated that 80 participants would be required to detect a same-sized social-emotional effect of response inhibition as that (d = .82) observed by Ferrey et al (2012, Exp. 2) with a power of 0.95 at an alpha of .05 (the same sample-size calculation was reported by Driscoll et al, 2018). All of the participants provided informed consent and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.…”

Stimulus devaluation by backward inhibition exceeds any emotional impact of cognitive conflict: Evidence from task switching

“…Combined with evidence that conflict between competing stimulus/response representations elicits negative affect and thereby leads to more negative evaluations of associated stimuli (Damen et al, 2018;Fritz & Dreisbach, 2013;Goller et al, 2019), it makes sense that researchers (e.g., Chetverikov & Kristjansson, 2015; would question whether stimulusdevaluation effects previously attributed to the affective consequences of inhibition are instead due to the emotional impact of conflict. Resolving whether inhibition has negative affective consequences that exceed any emotional impact of conflict is therefore important for the interpretation of a large and growing corpus of findings that have been thought to reflect stimulus devaluation by inhibition (e.g., Chen, Veling, Dijksterhuis, & Holland, 2016;Chen, Holland, Quandt, Dijksterhuis, & Veling, 2019;Clancy et al, 2019;Driscoll et al, 2018;Fenske et al, 2004;2005;Frischen et al, 2012;Goolsby et al, 2009;Houben et al, 2012;Kihara et al, 2011;Kiss et al, 2007;Martiny-Huenger et al, 2014;Raymond et al, 2003;2005;Vivas et al, 2016;Veling et al, 2008;Wessel & O'Doherty, 2014;Wessel et al, 2015).…”