Abstract
Evidence indicates that personal relative deprivation (PRD) can lead to various impulsive behaviors. Given that impulsive behaviors are usually caused by a failure to exert cognitive control, the purpose of this study was to explore whether PRD affects the ability to exert cognitive control on behavior. Forty-six healthy participants were randomly assigned to PRD or non-PRD group. Participants of the PRD group were told their income would lie below the Chinese average. While their electrophysiological responses were recorded, they underwent a Go/No-Go task simultaneously assessing the ability to detect response conflict and inhibit the predominant response. We found that the individuals with induced PRD show diminished ability to inhibit predominant response. We suggest this is because PRD-related concerns consume cognitive resources, leaving less for other tasks. However, we also found that individuals with induced PRD show enhanced ability to detect conflict. This might be because that individuals with induced PRD were sensitive to potentially threatening information (high-conflict No-Go trials) and they can detect conflict with less cognitive resources. These findings may facilitate future attempts to design interventions for relatively deprived individuals to manage their impulsive behavior.
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Data availability
The datasets analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. NSFC71472156, 31900800 and 32100871), the Natural Science Foundation of Shenzhen (Grant No. JCYJ20190808123211511), Natural Science Foundation of SZU (Grant No. 2019112), the Excellent Scientific and Technological Talents Project of Shenzhen (Grant No. RCBS20210609103054028), Social Science Foundation of Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University (2023SDKYB018), Social Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (2021P008), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M702064) and the Humanities and Social Sciences youth program of Ministry of Education of China (20YJC190003).
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Zhang, L., Qiao, L., Xu, M. et al. Personal relative deprivation impairs the ability to inhibit impulsive responses: an exploratory ERP study. Cogn Process 24, 609–618 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-023-01147-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-023-01147-z