Irrelevant angry faces impair response inhibition, and the go and stop processes share attentional resources

Response inhibition is a crucial component of executive control, which refers to our ability to suppress responses that are no longer needed or inappropriate. The stop-signal task is a standard tool to assess inhibitory control over actions. Here, we use irrelevant facial expressions (happy, angry, or neutral) as both go and stop-signal to examine competition for shared attentional resources between (a) emotion and inhibition process and (b) go and stop processes. Participants were required to respond to go signals (gender discrimination task: male or female). Occasionally, a stop-signal (face with irrelevant angry, happy, or neutral facial expression) was presented, and participants were required to withhold their motor response. We found that emotion processing (especially angry faces) captures attention away from the task, and the emotionality of the stop signal matters only when the go signal is non-emotional. When the go signal was non-emotional, we found that stop-signal with irrelevant angry facial expressions impaired inhibitory control compared to stop-signal with irrelevant happy and neutral facial expressions. These results indicate that the processing of emotion and inhibition process exploit a shared pool of attentional resources. These results favor an interactive capacity-sharing account of the go and stop processes in models of response inhibition.