Relationships Between Behavioural Inhibitory Control and Cognitive Control Strategies and Beliefs in Response to Affective Stimuli

In view of the discrepancy across studies and the absence of a relationship between behavioural inhibitory control and cognitive control tasks, there appears to be a need, and hence our study purpose, to explore the relationships between inhibitory behavioural control and attentional cognitive control, and possible associated metacognitive variables, in affective contexts of displeasure and arousal. Forty-five people (40 females), aged between 18 and 71 (M = 21.9; SD = 8.03), volunteered to take part in research on cognitive intrusion. The instruments they made were GAD-7, MCQ-30, TCQ and two experimental tasks: An Emotional Go/No-Go and an Emotional Flanker Task. This study has sought to use behavioural tasks to discover whether the capacity for behavioural inhibition when faced with potentially anxiety-provoking stimuli (i.e. unpleasant affective images with high arousal) is mediated by metacognitive variables or by attentional cognitive control. The results suggest the following: (1) worry and anxiety predict errors in the emotional Go/No-Go task and (2) shorter RTs in the flanker task increase the errors in the emotional Go/No-Go task when viewing unpleasant images with high arousal.