The role of active inhibitory control in psychological well-being and mindfulness

Abstract

Inhibition is an essential cognitive ability. In this paper, we propose that the faculty of active inhibition is important for psychological well-being because people can use this capacity to reduce interference from unwanted emotional distractors. In order to examine this hypothesis, we investigate the relationship between the capacity for active inhibition and psychological well-being. Study 1 shows that people with higher capacities for active inhibition have more peace of mind and higher satisfaction with life. Study 2 indicates that people who exhibit higher capacities for active inhibition have more peace of mind and are less likely to be depressed. In addition, Study 2 also shows that people with higher capacities for active inhibition are more able to act with awareness.

Introduction

The inhibition of unwanted information is essential for everyday human cognition. Inhibition is required while humans process external input. The environment contains many objects that distract people from their target objects. In order to locate an object that one seeks and ignore all other distracting objects, one must use distractor inhibition (Tipper, 1985, Tipper, 2001). Inhibition is also a component of action control. Response inhibition is used to suppress prepotent responses; it is necessary in order to avoid the production of an inappropriate action (Logan & Cowan, 1984). In addition, inhibition is required in order to process internal thoughts and memories (Anderson and Green, 2001, Levy et al., 2007); without inhibition, irrelevant or disturbing thoughts or memories might overwhelm the individual.

Inhibition is also crucial for emotional regulation. Consistent with this idea, it has been demonstrated that impaired cognitive inhibition is associated with depression (Frings et al., 2007, Goeleven et al., 2006, Joormann, 2004, Joormann and Gotlib, 2010). In these studies, negative priming, which is an automatic inhibition task (Nigg, 2000) was used to measure the performance of cognitive inhibition. However, the role of active inhibitory control in emotion regulation and psychological well-being has not yet been clarified.

It is important to make a distinction between automatic and active inhibition because the latter is also an important mechanism for emotion regulation in daily life. Automatic inhibition, such as negative priming (Tipper, 1985, Tipper, 2001) or inhibition of return (Posner & Cohen, 1984; see Klein, 2000 for a review), can operate without a person’s awareness of the distracting information or an incentive to inhibit the non-predictive cues. In contrast, active or intentional inhibition operates via effortful control and involves executive functioning (Nigg, 2000). Consistent with this idea, active inhibition requires working memory resources in order to operate (Chao, 2010a, Chao, 2011). In addition, active inhibition is observed only when there is an incentive or an intention to actively inhibit the distractor (Chao, 2010a, Chao, 2011) and when there is sufficient time for active inhibition to take place (Chao, 2010a).

The ability to exert active inhibitory control is important for emotional regulation. Active inhibitory control provides a method by which people can deliberately exclude emotional distractors (e.g., an angry face, a negative thought, or a negative event) that may affect their well-being. By excluding unwanted emotional information, people can focus on desired or goal-related information and thereby promote their own well-being. For instance, in a recent study on the role of attentional control of emotional distractors in times of life stress, Vanderhasselt, Koster, Goubert, and De Raedt (in press) suggested that the capacity to overcome distraction caused by emotional information may promote adaptive responses to stress. Considering their findings, active inhibition, a mechanism for actively excluding unwanted distractors, could be important for adaptive coping and well-being. In addition, Lee, Lin, Huang, and Fredrickson (in press) argued that the process of emotional control plays an important role in achieving peace of mind (i.e., the enjoyment of a peaceful and balanced life). Active inhibition, as one important mechanism for cognitive control, may help people to exclude undesired emotional information and thoughts and hence promote peace of mind. Considering the importance of active inhibition, we hypothesize that people with higher capacities for active inhibition are more capable of voluntarily reducing interference from unwanted emotional distractors, and hence, they have higher levels of psychological well-being. In the present paper, we report two studies investigating this prediction.