The Effects of Emotion on Cognitive Inhibition

th , 2013 revised: Jul. 4 th , 2013; accepted: Jul. 28 th , 2013 Abstract: To investigate the effects of emotion on cognition inhibition, a 3 (emotion type: positive, negative and neutral) by 3 (task type: congruent, incongruent and neutral) within subject design was conducted. Thirty eight university students participated in the experiment, emotional pictures (60 pictures for positive, negative and neutral scenes each) selected from the Chinese Affective Picture System (CAPS) were used as experi- ment materials to induce participants' emotion and showed before the stroop task, in which the participants were asked to name the color of the word printed and ignore the word meaning. The results showed that the main effect of task type and the interaction of emotion type and task type were significant, further analyses revealed larger stroop effect for emotion condition than neutral condition. From the current results, we can conclude that emotion (positive and negative) can disrupt cognitive inhibition.