Evidence map›Paper›PMID 40276668›Full record

ArticleFrontiers in psychology2025

Effects of aging and valence on emotional response inhibition: conclusions from a novel stop-signal task.

Jill D Waring, Stephanie N Hartling

Abstract read
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Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

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1citing papers in PubMed
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1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

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2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed.

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4 · The record

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Jill D WaringDepartment of Psychology, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, United States.
Stephanie N HartlingDepartment of Psychology, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, United States.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Emotional and cognitive processes interact in myriad ways during daily life, and the relation between emotion and cognition changes across the lifespan. Aging is associated with decreasing cognitive control and inhibition alongside improvements in emotional control and regulation. However, little is known about how aging impacts response inhibition within emotionally relevant contexts. The current study examined how aging impacts emotional response inhibition by comparing older and younger adults' ability to stop responses to emotional images. Participants completed a novel stop-signal task where pleasant and unpleasant scene images appeared on a minority of trials, while participants developed a pre-potent 'go' response during trials presenting neutral shapes. Notably, in each task block only one of the two types of emotional scene images served as a task-relevant stop cue, e.g., unpleasant images as stop-signals. Accordingly, in a given task block participants should continue to respond at the onset of the other type of emotional image (i.e., pleasant scenes as 'go-images'). Overall, older adults exhibited less efficient stopping than younger adults. However, stopping did not differ between pleasant and unpleasant images in either age group. Thus, while response inhibition is less efficient in older adults, it does not differ by emotion across adulthood. The innovative design also permitted exploratory analyses of responses to images that were not the current stop-signal, i.e., responses correctly executed for 'go-image' trials. In contrast with response inhibition on stop trials, emotion and aging significantly interacted during response execution, with older adults performing less accurately than younger adults on unpleasant go-image trials. Taken together, aging interacts with emotion only for response execution but not response inhibition for emotional scenes. This study offers new insights into the effects of aging on response inhibition in emotionally complex contexts and increases the ecological validity of response inhibition research. It also highlights the distinct effects of aging and emotion on response execution versus inhibition for task-relevant emotional information.

Indexed as

agingemotionexecutive functioninginhibitory controlresponse inhibitionstop-signal task

Identifiers

PMID40276668
PMCPMC12020514

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.