Czajak, D. & Cipora, K.
Institute of Psychology. Jagiellonian University. Cracow, Poland.
The aim of presented study was to examine whether high/low avoidance-motivated negative affect influences cognitive inhibition. Despite the fact that inhibition is one of the key aspects of cognitive control only few studies investigated its connections with emotions. Amongst all, some studies revealed that positive mood can lead to increase in the inhibitory costs in Stroop task, while negative affect may reduce Stroop interference. What is more, it has been shown that affective influences on the attentional breadth can be changed depending on the type of approach/avoidance motivation of given affect. Here we focus on negative affect, to which not much attention was paid in previous studies. We hypothesize that approach/avoidance motivation modulates influence of negative emotions not only on attention but on inhibition processes as well. To manipulate affect and type of motivation IAPS (International affective picture system) pictures were presented. The low/high avoidance-evoking pictures were chosen on the basis of pilot study. Subjects were assigned to one of the three groups in which: (1) high avoidance-motivated negative affect; (2) low avoidance-motivated negative affect; (3) neutral affect were evoked. Stop signal and go/no-go tasks were used to measure efficiency of inhibition processes. Data is being processed.