Influences of Emotional Information on Response Inhibition in Gaming Disorder: Behavioral and ERP Evidence from Go/Nogo Task

Abstract

Background: Gaming disorder (GD) may impair executive functions such as response inhibition. According to the tripartite neurocognitive model, the interoceptive system generates a state of craving that exacerbates the dysfunction of GD. We speculate that emotional information may play an important role in the mechanism, which leads to impaired response inhibition in people with GD. Methods: A three-factor mixed experimental design was adopted in this go/nogo task. The between-subject factor was group (GD or control group), and the within-subject factors were two types of emotional information, task relevance (related or unrelated) and emotional valence (negative or positive). Results: The GD group had lower nogo accuracies than the control group in the task-unrelated condition and also in the negative condition. Parallelly, the GD group showed faster reactions and lower accuracy in the go trials than the control group under task-unrelated negative conditions. At the neural level, the GD group had smaller amplitudes of nogo-N2 and larger amplitudes of nogo-P3 than the control group in the task-unrelated condition. Conclusions: The findings prove the hypothesis of this study that emotional information could be a factor leading to impaired response inhibition in GD individuals. The response inhibition abilities of GD are weakened when processing task-unrelated or negative information, which may be caused by failure of behavioral inhibition and weakened conflict control, resulting in more cognitive resources to complete response suppression under specific conditions. This study provides evidence for weaker response inhibition in GD individuals from the perspective of cognitive–emotional interaction and provides more detailed information for interventions for GD.

Neural Network Dynamics and Brain Oscillations Underlying Aberrant Inhibitory Control in Internet Addiction

“…Echoing these studies, we found that Stop-P3 was attenuated in participants with Internet addiction. These findings provide evidence to support the theory that the required cognitive resources are aberrant in IA to successfully suppress response impulses or the stopping processes [55,56]. However, it is worth mentioning that the significance of Stop-P3 between the two groups diminished after taking age factor as a covariate in the present study.…”

EEG components of inhibitory control ability in internet gaming disorder: A systematic review and meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials

“…The Go/NoGo experiment revealed that the group with online gaming disorder exhibited lower NoGo accuracies than the control group. This difference in performance could be attributed to behavioral inhibition failure and weakened conflict control, which require more cognitive resources to complete suppression responses under certain circumstances (Chen et al., 2022 ). The response inhibition abilities of individuals with gaming disorder are weakened, which might be attributed to the failure of behavioral inhibition and reduced conflict control, ultimately requiring more cognitive resources to complete response suppression under specific conditions (Chen et al., 2022 ; Fathi et al., 2022 ).…”

“…This difference in performance could be attributed to behavioral inhibition failure and weakened conflict control, which require more cognitive resources to complete suppression responses under certain circumstances (Chen et al., 2022 ). The response inhibition abilities of individuals with gaming disorder are weakened, which might be attributed to the failure of behavioral inhibition and reduced conflict control, ultimately requiring more cognitive resources to complete response suppression under specific conditions (Chen et al., 2022 ; Fathi et al., 2022 ). A meta‐analysis found that, compared to healthy individuals, those with gaming disorders were more likely to display impaired response inhibition (Argyriou et al., 2017 ).…”