The Core Component of Emotional Impulsivity: Mouse-cursor Tracking Study

Individuals with impulsive tendencies often exhibit abnormal reward processing, such as impulsive choice (IC) and impulsive action (IA). It is known that emotion exacerbates these impulsive behaviors (emotional impulsivity). However, the core cognitive trait responsible for emotional impulsivity remains unclear. The dominant theory suggests that emotions primarily impair response inhibition, but an alternative theory proposes that emotions strongly influence one’s capacity to maintain and focus attention on the task at hand. However, the empirical evidence supporting these theories is inconsistent—few correlations have been reported between self-report measures of emotional impulsivity (UPPS) and behavioral measures (stop-signal task) of impulsivity beyond clinical populations. This study probes the interplay among emotions, impulsive action (IA), attentional impulsivity (AI), and impulsive choice (IC) by utilizing mouse-cursor tracking versions of stop-signal and delay discounting tasks. We elicited positive and negative emotions using standardized emotional pictures and examined the extent to which elicited emotions altered behavioral indices (patterns of mouse-cursor motions) of impulsivity—impulsive action, impulsive choice, and attentional impulsivity. Our findings suggest that, in a nonclinical population, both attentional impulsivity and impulsive action represent the cognitive traits that correspond to different aspects of emotional impulsivity. While negative emotional stimuli enhance impulsive action, both positive and negative emotional stimuli heighten attentional impulsivity. This indicates that positive and negative emotions selectively influence impulsive actions and attentional impulsivity.