Schedule of Events | Symposia

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

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Jill D. Waring¹ (jill.waring@health.slu.edu), Stephanie N. Hartling¹; ¹Saint Louis University

Aging is associated with declining cognitive control and inhibition abilities alongside improvements in emotional control and regulation. However, little is known about how aging impacts response inhibition for emotional contexts. The current study asked how typical aging processes influence emotional response inhibition, specifically whether older and younger adults differ in ability to stop responses to emotional scene images. To address these questions we developed a novel stop-signal task, with pleasant and unpleasant scene images each serving as task-relevant rare Stop cues, in turn. Results revealed that, overall, older adults had less efficient stopping compared to younger adults. However, there were no significant differences in stopping for pleasant versus unpleasant images for either group. Thus, aging impacts response inhibition generally, but stopping ability does not differ by emotion from younger to older adulthood. The innovative design also permitted exploratory analyses of responses to images that were not the current stop-signal, i.e., responses correctly executed in 'Go-image' trials. In contrast with results of response inhibition on Stop trials, emotion and aging significantly interacted to impact correct response execution on Go-image trials. Taken together, we concluded that aging significantly interacts with valence only for response execution but not response inhibition for complex emotional scenes. The present study offers the first insights into the effects of aging on response inhibition in emotionally complex contexts, increasing ecological validity over prior standard tasks of response inhibition. It also highlights distinct effects of aging and emotion on response execution versus response inhibition to task-relevant emotional information.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions