Anger Weakens Behavioral Inhibition Selectively in Contact Athletes

Studies have increasingly found that the aggression level of contact athletes is higher than that of non-athletes. Given that higher aggression levels are associated with worse behavioral inhibition and that athletes show better behavioral inhibition than non-athletes, it is unclear why contact athletes would exhibit higher aggression levels. Emotion, especially anger, is an important factor in the generation of aggressive behavior, and anger has been shown to affect behavioral inhibition. Thus, the present study examined the influence of anger on behavioral inhibition in contact athletes. An implicit emotional Go/No-go task was used that contained 50 anger-associated words and 50 neutral words as stimuli. Participants were asked to execute a key press depending on the explicit color of word and to ignore any (implicit) emotional information associated with the word. The results showed a significant interaction in performance accuracy on the No-go task between emotion (i.e., anger-associated words versus neutral words) and group (athlete versus non-athlete). The performance accuracy of the contact athletes on anger-associated stimuli was significantly lower than that for neutral stimuli. Evoked delta and theta oscillations were analyzed at the time windows 200–600 and 200–400 ms respectively in both groups. A time-frequency analysis indicated a significant interaction between group, emotion and task for both evoked delta and theta oscillations. Post hoc analyses showed that stronger evoked delta and theta oscillations were evoked during the presentation of anger-associated stimuli compared with neutral stimuli on the No-go task in athletes. By contrast, no other significant effect was found in the control group or between the control and athlete groups. These results indicate that time-frequency analysis can effectively distinguish conventional ERP components and that implicit anger significantly weakens behavioral inhibition in contact athletes but not in non-athletes.