Emotional Reactivity and Inhibitory Control in Nonsuicidal Self-Injury Adolescence: Divergence Between Positive and Negative Emotions

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is prevalent in adolescents and is often linked to emotion dysregulation. However, it remains unknown which specific processes of emotion regulation and under what emotional context these processes are related to the risk for NSSI in samples of community-based adolescents. This study used two laboratory tasks to examine whether adolescents with a history of NSSI displayed difficulties in emotional reactivity and inhibitory control in response to negative and positive emotions. In Study 1, adolescents with/without a history of NSSI (N = 64; MAge = 13.45 ± 0.50; 53% female) completed a picture perception task in which they were asked to judge the valence and arousal of images. In Study 2, adolescents with/without a history of NSSI (N = 74; MAge = 13.49 ± 0.80; 50% female) were given a two-choice emotional oddball task that required them to differentially respond to frequent stimuli (images of an object) and infrequent stimuli (affective images). The results showed that adolescents with a history of NSSI showed decreased emotional sensitivity and lower levels of inhibitory control in response to images depicting negative emotional content but not to those depicting positive emotional content. Furthermore, affective inhibitory control problems were significantly positively related to the severity of NSSI, especially in the context of negative emotions. These findings suggest that there is a divergence between positive and negative emotions in both emotional reactivity and affective inhibitory control processes on NSSI. Specifically, relative to adolescents with no history of NSSI, adolescents with a history of NSSI showed lower emotional awareness and behavioral inhibitory control when processing negative emotions, but these distinctions were not found in contexts involving positive emotions. Additionally, the results suggest that affective inhibitory control deficits specific for negative emotions may result in vulnerability to increased NSSI severity.