Romantic Love Is Associated with Enhanced Inhibitory Control in an Emotional Stop-Signal Task

Abstract

Purpose: This study explored whether romantic lovers differ in emotion-related inhibitory control capacity from those who are single.Methods: 88 healthy undergraduate college students participated in the study. Half were currently in love and in a romantic relationship (love group, LG), and half were single and had never been in a romantic relationship (single group, SG). Based on duration of romantic relationship (i.e., love duration), the LG were further divided into two subgroups: “early stage love” and “longer periods of love”. All participants completed an emotional Stop Signal Task, consisting of a variety of human face stimuli displaying either sad or neutral affect.Results: Results found that relative to SG, lovers showed greater inhibitory control [shorter stop-signal reaction time (SSRT)] during negative emotion condition trials. Furthermore, in early stages of love, SSRT for negative emotion condition trials was significantly shorter compared to that in “longer periods of love” or SG individuals, with no significant differences between the two latter groups.Conclusion: Compared with individuals who were single, early stage lovers showed greater capacity for inhibiting action during presentation of negative emotional stimuli. Within a greater social context, greater inhibitory control capacity during early stages of love may be related to the successful formation of romantic relationships, particularly to the ability to persevere in goal-directed action despite negative emotional contexts such as that of sadness.

Negative Impact of Sadness on Response Inhibition in Females: An Explicit Emotional Stop Signal Task fMRI Study

“…In the present study, we duplicate our previous main finding ( Song et al, 2016 ). Individuals exhibited longer SSRTs for sad condition trials as compared with neutral condition trials, suggesting impaired response inhibition in response to sad facial expression processing, which indicated that sadness (despite being an emotion of low arousal), like other strong negative emotions, can disturb behavioral inhibitory control.…”

“…The explicit eSST may have a better ecological validity than implicit eSST in some situations. In daily socio-emotional contexts, it is of great importance executing successful response inhibition over negative emotions in an explicit manner in order to form and maintain an intimate relationship especially in early stages of love ( Song et al, 2016 ). Neither “priming eSST” nor “implicit eSST” paradigms seemed to be able to properly simulate the situations where executing inhibition with emotions is processed intentionally at the same time.…”

“…An explicit eSST ( Figure 1 ) based on previous works ( Song et al, 2016 ) was used in the current study. The stimuli comprised of 80 facial expression pictures, half of which were sad and half were neutral.…”

“…Because the processing of the emotional stimuli of interest occurs outside of the scope of deliberate attention, and are incidentally processed, we refer to it as “implicit eSST.” As such, both “priming eSST” and “implicit eSST” may fail to test motoric inhibition during intentional and conscious executive processing of emotional stimuli. However, in daily socio-emotional contexts, in order to form and maintain an intimate relationship especially in the early stage of love, it is of great importance executing successful response inhibition over negative emotions in an explicit manner ( Song et al, 2016 ). For example, a boy would stop complaining once he noticed sadness on his girlfriend’s facial expression.…”

“…For example, a boy would stop complaining once he noticed sadness on his girlfriend’s facial expression. Thus, in our recent study, we for the first time used facial expressions as the targets of response inhibition ( Song et al, 2016 ), in which participants were required to respond according to the type of emotion shown on the face stimuli (sad vs. neutral) and to stop any reaction when a stop signal (a red cross mark) occurred. In the interest of parsimony, we referred to this paradigm as an “explicit eSST,” as participants had to intentionally process facial emotions while simultaneously being engaged in the stop signal task (SST).…”