The point of no return in the Emotional Stop-Signal Task: A matter of affect or method?

An affective variant of the Stop-Signal task was used to study the interaction between emotion and response inhibition (RI) in healthy young participants. The task involved the covert presentation of emotional faces as go stimuli, as well as a manipulation of motivation and affect by inducing a negative mood through the assignment of unfair punishment. In the literature on emotion and RI, there are contrasting findings reflecting the variability in the method used to calculate the RI latency, namely the Stop-Signal Reaction Time (SSRT). In fact, previous studies found both facilitatory and detrimental effects of affective manipulations over RI. However, they did not use the most robust SSRT estimation approach, namely the integration, casting some doubts on the reliability of the inferences. For these reasons, the present research draws attention on how the effect of the emotional manipulation may be due to a biased SSRT estimation. Specifically, the focus of our study was on how the effect of emotion on the SSRT may vary according to different estimation procedures, the mean and two variants of the integration method. We predicted that the effect of the emotional manipulation in the SST would depend on the SSRT estimation method employed. Indeed, a significant effect of emotion was only found when SSRT was estimated with the mean method. We conclude that the mean method should be avoided in the study of emotion and RI because it overestimates SSRT. Rather, the integration approach should be used for future research in this field, while also factoring in information about the participants’ strategy in emotional contexts that require greater effortful control and offer a challenge to self-regulation both in health and disease.