Response Inhibition and Memory Retrieval of Emotional Target Words: Evidence from an Emotional Stop-Signal Task

Previous research suggests that emotional stimuli capture attention and guide behavior often automatically. The present study investigated the relationship between emotion-driven attention capture and motor response inhibition to emotional words in the stop-signal task. By experimental variations of the onset of motor response inhibition across the time-course of emotional word processing, we show that processing of emotional information significantly interferes with motor response inhibition in an early time-window, previously related to automatic emotion-driven attention capture. Second, we found that stopping reduced memory recall for unpleasant words during a subsequent surprise free recall task supporting assumptions of a link between mechanisms of motor response inhibition and memory functions. Together, our results provide behavioral evidence for dual competition models of emotion and cognition. This study provides an important link between research focusing on different sub-processes of emotion processing (from perception to action and from action to memory).