Response inhibition negatively impacts social-emotional evaluations of specific individuals

Abstract

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.

Stopped cold: Motor-response inhibition reduces the capacity of sexually-explicit stimuli to elicit subjective and physiological sexual arousal

“…Beyond clear evidence that inhibitory mechanisms are critically involved both in ignoring distracting information and stopping unwanted actions (for recent reviews see Chelazzi et al, 2019;Duque et al, 2017;Gaspelin & Luck, 2018;Noonan et al, 2018), extensive research now demonstrates that simply ignoring or withholding motor-responses from an unfamiliar face or whole-body image also negatively impacts subsequent social-emotional evaluations of those people, including relatively lower ratings of their trustworthiness (Doallo et al, 2012;Driscoll, Clancy & Fenske, 2020;Fenske et al, 2005;Frischen et al, 2012;Goolsby et al, 2009;Kiss et al, 2008;Raymond et al, 2005), likeability (Martiny-Huenger et al, 2014), and attractiveness (Ferrey et al, 2012;Driscoll et al, 2018). These findings have led to the hypothesis-supported by converging cognitive-behavioural (e.g., Frischen et al, 2012), computational modeling (Fragopanagos et al, 2009), neuroimaging (De Vito et al, 2017;Doallo et al, 2012;Kiss et al, 2008) and psychophysiological (Clancy et al,, 2019) evidence-that inhibition elicits negative affect or otherwise alters the coding of stimulus-value for associated items (for reviews see Fenske & Raymond, 2006;Raymond, 2009;Gollwitzer et al, 2014).…”