The role of inhibition in neurotic behavior

Neurotic behavior is explained according to the theory of Pavlov as collision between excitation and inhibition. This internal inhibition imposes a burden on the nervous system. The stress can be relieved by what Pavlov called external inhibition, which is actually excitation of another activity. This principle is applied to the human being in explaining the interaction between nervous centers, the advantage of voluntary self-discipline over imposed discipline. Rioting and social unrest is explained in the terms of conflict between excitation and inhibition.     

Inhibitory control during sentence reading in dyslexic children.

The present study focused on the nature of the reading disability of children with the guessing subtype of dyslexia (who read fast and inaccurately). The objective was to separate the excitatory account of their reading disturbance (i.e., in guessers the words' resting levels of activation are oversensitive to semantic context) from the inhibitory account (i.e., guessers tend to react prematurely to (false) candidate words that are activated in the lexicon). To disentangle the above accounts, guessers and normal readers were presented with a sentential priming task (SPT). In the SPT, subjects had to determine whether the final word of a sentence was semantically congruent or incongruent with the sentence, but had to inhibit their 'congruent' or 'incongruent' response in case of an occasionally presented pseudoword. To evoke guessing, each pseudoword closely resembled either a valid congruent or incongruent word. Guessing referred to prematurely accepting a pseudoword as a word that either appropriately or inappropriately completed the sentence. The extent to which subjects guessed at word meaning was evidenced by the false recognition rates (FRR) of the misspelled terminal words. Analyses on the FRRs of the pseudowords showed that guessers had significantly more difficulty in suppressing the 'go tendency' triggered by the pseudowords. It was concluded that the impulsive reading style of guessers should be ascribed to a less efficient suppression mechanism rather than to excessive reliance on contextual information. Specifically, the data were explained by assuming that the availability of the pseudoword's candidate meaning activated the hand to respond with, and that guessers found difficulty in suspending this response until they analyzed all letters in the stimulus and they could be sure of its spelling.     

Hemispheric differences in stop task performance

This study examined hemispheric specialization for stop task performance. It was found that inhibitory performance was better for stop signals presented in the right visual field. This result provided support for the hypothesis that, during stop task performance, subjects call upon the left-lateralized neural system that is involved in active attention. It was suggested that a stop task requires such a mode of attention because subjects maintain a tonic readiness for inhibitory action while being engaged in the stop task's go routine. Subjects are continuously alert for possible stop signals while discriminating between go stimuli. The stop task may be considered a typical activation task.