Social-emotional evaluations of unfamiliar people are negatively impacted by ignoring or withholding motor-responses from images that depict them; an effect attributed to the propensity of inhibition to affectively devalue associated stimuli. Prior findings suggest that the social-emotional consequences of inhibition may be mediated by category-level representations that impact all members of a corresponding group. Here we assess whether social devaluation by inhibition also operates on item-level representations of specific individuals. Participants memorized individual identities of a group of fellow students before completing a Go/No-go response-inhibition task designed to associate item-level representations of each previously-memorized person with inhibition (No-go trials) or no inhibition (Go trials). Social identities associated with inhibition were consistently rated as less trustworthy in subsequent evaluations than those associated with Go trials that were not inhibited. This suggests that the social-emotional consequences of inhibition can be mediated by item-level stimulus representations in memory.

The motivational incentive of sexual stimuli can be a salient force in determining the focus of thought and behaviour. Here we show that the simple act of not pressing a key during the perception of sexual content reduces its motivational incentive and subsequent capacity to elicit sexual arousal. Undergraduate participants (N=116) completed a Go/No-go task that required them to inhibit responses to either sexual or non-sexual images. Later they watched sexually explicit videos and reported moment-to-moment changes in self-reported sexual arousal, while thermography was used to record changes in genital physiological arousal. Participants who previously inhibited sexual images experienced lower levels of both self-reported and physiological arousal than those who inhibited non-sexual images. These results extend prior research to suggest that a by-product of motor-response inhibition is a negative alteration of stimulus-value representations for associated items— the kind of value that drives even the most biologically-fundamental forms of motivated behaviour.