Validation of an emotional stop-signal task to probe individual differences in emotional response inhibition: Relationships with positive and negative urgency

Abstract

Performance on an emotional stop-signal task designed to assess emotional response inhibition has been associated with Negative Urgency and psychopathology, particularly self-injurious behaviors. Indeed, difficulty inhibiting prepotent negative responses to aversive stimuli on the emotional stop-signal task (i.e. poor negative emotional response inhibition) partially explains the association between Negative Urgency and non-suicidal self-injury. Here, we combine existing data sets from clinical (hospitalised psychiatric inpatients) and non-clinical (community/student participants) samples aged 18-65 years (N = 450) to examine the psychometric properties of this behavioural task and evaluate hypotheses that emotional stop-signal task metrics relate to distinct impulsive traits among participants who also completed the UPPS-P (n = 223). We specifically predicted associations between worse negative emotional response inhibition (i.e. commission errors during stop-signal trials representing negative reactions to unpleasant images) and Negative Urgency, whereas commission errors to positive stimuli - reflecting worse positive emotional response inhibition - would relate to Positive Urgency. Results support the emotional stop-signal task's convergent and discriminant validity: as hypothesised, poor negative emotional response inhibition was specifically associated with Negative Urgency and no other impulsive traits on the UPPS-P. However, we did not find the hypothesised association between positive emotional response inhibition and Positive Urgency. Correlations between emotional stop-signal task performance and self-report measures were the modest, similar to other behavioural tasks. Participants who completed the emotional stop-signal task twice (n = 61) additionally provide preliminary evidence for test-retest reliability. Together, findings suggest adequate reliability and validity of the emotional stop-signal task to derive candidate behavioural markers of neurocognitive functioning associated with Negative Urgency and psychopathology.

Keywords: Affective control; behavioural research; cognitive control; emotional regulation; executive function; neuropsychological tests; reactive inhibition; self-control; stop-signal task; urgency.

Figure 1.

The emotional stop-signal task (ESST) instructs participants to rapidly indicate the valence of serially presented images by keypress, except on trials with an auditory stop-signal, when participants are asked to inhibit their emotional reaction and accompanying behavioural response. If participants are unable to inhibit an emotional response on a stop or ‘no-go’ trial, the staircase tracking algorithm decreases the stop-signal delay (SSD) on the subsequent stop trial, thereby reducing time for stimulus evaluation, response selection, and motor preparation (and vice versa).

Figure 2.

(a) Description of primary emotional response inhibition (ERI) metrics derived from the Emotional Stop-Signal Task (ESST). (b) Conceptual model linking neurocognitive processes underlying emotion dysregulation (i.e. affective control, which includes ERI), related personality constructs (i.e. Urgency, Disinhibition, and Negative Affectivity), and transdiagnostic latent psychopathology risk (i.e. the p factor). Solid lines represent the theoretical relationships between measurable indicators and latent factors, dashed lines reflect the proposed causal associations, and dotted lines tie the ESST variables to the neurocognitive constructs they reflect. (c) Visualisation of test–retest correlations among main ERI variables (n = 55) reported in Table 3, with colour-coding of participant data corresponding to patients’ history of suicidal behaviors (SBs): SB− = teal (lighter shade) and SB+ = red (darker shade). (d) Visualisation of correlations between negative ERI metrics and Negative Urgency (n = 221) reported in Table 4, with colour-coding of participant data corresponding to ESST variant (and study site): original ESST (with NSSI stimuli) collected at ‘University B’ = lighter blue and revised ESST (with IAPS stimuli only) collected at ‘University A’ = darker blue.