Do emotional stimuli interfere with response inhibition? Evidence from the stop signal paradigm

Participants performed a stop signal task in which an emotional picture preceded a neutral stimulus. They were asked to respond on the basis of the identity of the neutral stimulus unless an auditory tone was presented, in which case participants should try to withhold their response. In Experiment 1, we used positive, neutral and negative pictures. Results demonstrated that the presentation of an emotional stimulus prolonged both response and stopping latencies regardless of the valence of the emotional stimulus. This suggested that the degree of arousal could modulate the interference effect. In Experiment 2, high- and low-arousing pictures with a positive or negative valence were used. In line with the arousal hypothesis, high-arousal pictures interfered more with responding and stopping than low-arousing pictures whereas the valence of the pictures had little or no effect. These findings support the hypothesis that emotional stimuli interrupt ongoing cognitively controlled activities because they attract attention away from these ongoing activities.     

African American Children’s Depressive Symptoms: The Prospective Effects of Neighborhood Disorder, Stressful Life Events, and Parenting

The prospective effects of observed neighborhood disorder, stressful life events, and parents’ engagement in inductive reasoning on adolescents’ depressive symptoms were examined using data collected from 777 African American families. Multilevel analyses revealed that stressful life events experienced at age 11 predicted depressive symptoms at age 13. Furthermore, a significant interaction between neighborhood disorder and parents’ engagement in inductive reasoning was found, indicating that parental use of inductive reasoning was a protective factor for depressive symptoms particularly for youths living in highly disordered neighborhoods. The importance of examining correlates of depressive symptoms from a contextual framework, focusing on individuals, families, and neighborhood contexts, is emphasized.