Instituto de Neurociencias, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.
Sci Rep. 2017 May 18;7(1):2082. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-02020-8.
Adolescents exhibit difficulties in behavioral regulation that become more evident when emotional contexts are involved, since these may hinder the development of socially-adaptive behaviors. The objectives of the present study were: to examine the influence of emotional contexts on adolescents' ability to inhibit a prepotent response, evaluated by ERPs, and to determine whether sex differences in response inhibition are observed in adolescents in those contexts. Participants performed a prepotent response inhibition task (Go-NoGo) under 3 background context conditions: neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant. While no differences in accuracy were observed, the presence of emotional contexts did prolong reaction times compared to the neutral context. Also, the unpleasant context caused an enhancement of N2 amplitudes compared to the neutral and pleasant contexts. Also, N2 and P3 latencies were longer in emotional contexts than in the neutral condition during both correct responses and correct inhibitions. No sex differences were found in amplitude, but females showed longer N2 and P3 latencies than males. These results confirm the idea that, in adolescents, unpleasant pictures receive preferential attention over neutral images and so generate greater difficulty in response inhibition. Finally, results demonstrate that sex differences in inhibition control in adolescence were observed only in relation to time-processing.
青少年在行为调节方面存在困难，而当涉及到情绪情境时，这些困难会更加明显，因为情绪情境可能会阻碍他们发展出社会适应行为。本研究的目的是：通过事件相关电位（ERP）评估，考察情绪情境对青少年抑制优势反应能力的影响，并确定在这些情境中，青少年在反应抑制方面是否存在性别差异。参与者在 3 种背景情境（中性、愉悦和不悦）下完成了优势反应抑制任务（Go-NoGo）。虽然在准确性方面没有差异，但与中性情境相比，情绪情境确实延长了反应时间。此外，与中性和愉悦情境相比，不愉快情境引起了 N2 波幅的增强。此外，在正确反应和正确抑制时，N2 和 P3 潜伏期在情绪情境中比在中性条件下更长。在幅度上没有发现性别差异，但女性的 N2 和 P3 潜伏期比男性长。这些结果证实了这样一种观点，即在青少年中，不愉快的图片比中性图像更受关注，因此在反应抑制方面会产生更大的困难。最后，结果表明，青少年抑制控制方面的性别差异仅在时间处理方面表现出来。
