Negative Emotional Action Termination: An Empirical Validation

Negative urgency refers to the tendency to act impulsively when distressed. This facet of impulsivity is associated with various forms of psychopathology. Our previous work on nonsuicidal self-injury shows that negative urgency is partially accounted for by impaired negative emotional action termination (NEAT), a behavioral marker of neurocognitive processing that theoretically represents one pathway to impulsive behavior in negative affective contexts. NEAT specifically refers to the ability to inhibit ongoing motor actions driven by negative emotional reactions and is measured via an emotional stop-signal task (ESST). Here, we extend this line of research by aggregating ESST data collected from our previous studies and our collaborators’ work to evaluate its psychometric properties. Our active research seeks to further assess the validity and reliability of this paradigm; in this study, we are currently implementing a modified ESST (Inhibitory Control over Emotion Task; ICE-T) that we designed to integrate with event-related potentials. This ESST variant improves on previous versions by enabling us to derive multiple independent estimates of stop-signal response time (SSRT) for each stimulus category in the task. SSRT is an established metric of response inhibition in stop-signal tasks, which we expect to provide a superior index of NEAT. This presentation/poster will showcase results of analyses to validate the ESST as a neurobehavioral paradigm that captures cognitive processes and neural circuit activity involved in urgency and other transdiagnostic constructs relevant to emotion dysregulation in psychopathology