Age-Related Changes in Executive Inhibition of Emotional and Non-emotional Interference

To examine the development of inhibitory capacity of emotional and cognitive conflicting interference by conducting a pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm, 96 participants in four age groups (9 yr, 12 yr, 20-24 yr, 68-74 yr) were required to name the colors of filtered images consisting of a series of pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant pictures. All the pictures were chosen from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and rated by a pilot group of undergraduate students. Results indicated that development of emotional interference inhibitory function was more rapid than that of cognitive conflicting interference inhibitory function; as for the aging aspect, the findings support the contrary. The inhibition of the emotional and non-emotional interference dissociates in the developmental time course, which supply new data for the research on inhibition of location and identity. It is useful to distinguish these two types of inhibitory processes in the identity inhibition. And the related paradigm shows promise as a nonlexical, ecologically valid approach to evaluating the selective processing of emotional distracters.