The association of negative urgency and sustained attention: Evidence from the late positive potential

Urgency reflects the tendency to act rashly in the face of intense emotion and has been associated with a host of maladaptive outcomes spanning psychopathology domains, including substance use, anxiety-related disorders, and suicide risk. Despite the impairment associated with urgency, work seeking to understand the neural mechanisms of this cognitive-affective risk factor has yielded inconsistent results, suggesting the need for new approaches to understand why some individuals are more likely to engage in impulsive behaviors in the context of positive and negative emotions. One possible mechanism is sustained attention on emotional information, measured by the late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential (ERP) component that indexes sustained attention toward motivationally significant and emotional stimuli. The present study aimed to elucidate the relations between sustained attention to emotional images and self-reported urgency. Community adults (n = 62) were recruited based on their report of either elevated suicide risk factors or no history/presence of suicide risk (health controls) and asked to complete an emotional interrupt task in which they viewed distracting, task-irrelevant negative, positive, and neutral images while responding to shapes on the screen. Results indicated that greater negative urgency was significantly associated with heightened sustained attention to threatening stimuli even when controlling for sex, negative affect, and difficulties in emotion regulation. However, more research is needed to replicate this finding, extend this work toward more granular assessments of momentary negative urgency, and to understand how other constructs such as emotion dysregulation moderate the effect of negative urgency on sustained attention.