Impairment in Conscious and Unconscious Response Inhibitions of Impulsive Violent Offenders on the Angry Condition
The present study utilized an emotional Go/No-go task(Experiment 1)and a masked Go/No-go task(Experiment 2)to examine the conscious and unconscious response inhibition abilities of violent offenders and a control group with neutral and angry emotional conditions.In Experiment 1,we found that both the control group and violent offenders had shorter Go reaction times and higher No-go error rates with the angry condition compared to the neutral condition.We also found that with the angry condition,violent offenders had even shorter Go reaction times and higher No-go error rates than the control group.In Experiment 2,the results showed that compared to the neutral condition,violent offenders had shorter No-go reaction times and RT-slowing on the angry condition,while no such significant differences were observed in the control group.Violent offenders had shorter No-go reaction times and RT-slowing under the angry condition compared to the control group.The results indicate that,compared to the neutral condition,violent offenders exhibit impaired conscious and unconscious response inhibitions on the angry condition.Additionally,the performance of violent offenders in conscious and unconscious response inhibitions are worse on the angry condition than that of the control group.