Impulsive reactivity to emotion and vulnerability to psychopathology.

Impulsiveness has been studied as an aspect of personality and psychopathology for generations. There are longstanding disagreements about how to define it and whether it should be viewed as one construct or several. This article begins by briefly reviewing some earlier and some more recent work on impulsiveness. Several approaches have recently converged to focus on a distinction between impulsive reactions to emotion and impulsive properties that are not initiated by emotion. From this review, we turn to psychopathology. It is well known that impulsiveness is related to externalizing psychopathology, but some have concluded that a similar relation does not exist for internalizing psychopathology. A recent literature is described that challenges the latter conclusion, linking impulsive reactivity to emotion to both externalizing and internalizing aspects of psychopathology. Discussion then turns to emotion-related impulsiveness and other constructs to which it is conceptually and empirically related, reexamining whether other conceptual targets should be added to the discussion. The article closes with a consideration of how important it is to continue to remain open to new conceptual perspectives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

[1]  Melissa A. Cyders,et al.  Is urgency emotionality? Separating urgent behaviors from effects of emotional experiences. , 2010, Personality and individual differences.

[2]  Marissa A. Gorlick,et al.  Serotonin Transporter Genetic Variation is Differentially Associated with Reflexive‐ and Reflective‐Optimal Learning , 2015, Cerebral cortex.

[3]  S. Whiteside,et al.  The Five Factor Model and impulsivity: using a structural model of personality to understand impulsivity , 2001 .

[4]  Ian H. Gotlib,et al.  Emotion regulation in depression: Relation to cognitive inhibition , 2010, Cognition & emotion.

[5]  A. Tellegen.  Structures of Mood and Personality and Their Relevance to Assessing Anxiety, With an Emphasis on Self-Report , 2019, Anxiety and the Anxiety Disorders.

[6]  C. Carver,et al.  Reflexive reaction to feelings predicts failed smoking cessation better than does lack of general self-control. , 2016, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[7]  J. Lacey,et al.  The impulsivist: a multi-impulsive personality disorder. , 1986, British Journal of Addiction.

[8]  Carsten Nicolas Boehler,et al.  Response inhibition and its relation to multidimensional impulsivity , 2014, NeuroImage.

[9]  R. Charnigo,et al.  Impulsive Personality and Alcohol Use: Bidirectional Relations Over One Year. , 2016, Journal of studies on alcohol and drugs.

[10]  A. Fossati,et al.  Impulsivity dimensions, emotion dysregulation, and borderline personality disorder features among Italian nonclinical adolescents , 2014, Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation.

[11]  Wendy Wood,et al.  Habit and intention in everyday life: The multiple processes by which past behavior predicts future behavior. , 1998 .

[12]  Donald R. Lynam,et al.  A test of the four-factor model of impulsivity-related traits , 2003 .

[13]  Sarah Fischer,et al.  Negative urgency: a personality predictor of externalizing behavior characterized by neuroticism, low conscientiousness, and disagreeableness. , 2012, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[14]  Sheri L. Johnson,et al.  Major depressive disorder and impulsive reactivity to emotion: toward a dual-process view of depression. , 2013, The British journal of clinical psychology.

[15]  L. Keltikangas-Järvinen,et al.  Impulsivity as a predictor of newly diagnosed depression. , 2007, Scandinavian journal of psychology.

[16]  P. McGuffin,et al.  The moderation by the serotonin transporter gene of environmental adversity in the etiology of depression: 2009 update , 2010, Molecular Psychiatry.

[17]  Raina D. Pang,et al.  Depressive symptoms, negative urgency and substance use initiation in adolescents. , 2014, Drug and alcohol dependence.

[18]  C. Carver,et al.  Relations of serotonin function to personality: Current views and a key methodological issue , 2006, Psychiatry Research.

[19]  S. Manuck,et al.  Brain Serotonin and Aggressive Disposition in Humans and Nonhuman Primates , 2005 .

[20]  Melissa A. Cyders,et al.  Positive urgency predicts illegal drug use and risky sexual behavior. , 2009, Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors.

[21]  Joël Billieux,et al.  Heterogeneous inhibition processes involved in different facets of self-reported impulsivity: evidence from a community sample. , 2008, Acta psychologica.

[22]  S. Coffey,et al.  Relations among behavioral and questionnaire measures of impulsivity in a sample of suicide attempters. , 2013, Suicide & life-threatening behavior.

[23]  Gregory T. Smith,et al.  The reciprocal predictive relationship between high-risk personality and drinking: An 8-wave longitudinal study in early adolescents. , 2016, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[24]  Sarah Fischer,et al.  On the Validity and Utility of Discriminating Among Impulsivity-Like Traits , 2007, Assessment.

[25]  Jorge Valderrama,et al.  Early life stress predicts negative urgency through brooding, depending on 5-HTTLPR genotype: A pilot study with 6-month follow-up examining suicide ideation , 2017, Psychiatry Research.

[26]  J. Hewitt,et al.  Genetic and Environmental Associations Between Procrastination and Internalizing/Externalizing Psychopathology , 2017, Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[27]  Sheri L. Johnson,et al.  Positive urgency is related to difficulty inhibiting prepotent responses. , 2016, Emotion.

[28]  Jonathan Evans,et al.  Science Perspectives on Psychological , 2022 .

[29]  T. Robbins,et al.  Goal-directed learning and obsessive–compulsive disorder , 2014, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[30]  T. Beauchaine,et al.  Trait Impulsivity and the Externalizing Spectrum. , 2017, Annual review of clinical psychology.

[31]  W. Wood.  Habit in Personality and Social Psychology , 2017, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[32]  Sheri L. Johnson,et al.  Toward a Functional View of the p Factor in Psychopathology , 2017, Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[33]  R. Krueger,et al.  Reinterpreting comorbidity: a model-based approach to understanding and classifying psychopathology. , 2006, Annual review of clinical psychology.

[34]  H. Eysenck,et al.  Manual of the Eysenck personality questionnaire , 1975 .

[35]  Sheri L. Johnson,et al.  Serotonergic function, two-mode models of self-regulation, and vulnerability to depression: what depression has in common with impulsive aggression. , 2008, Psychological bulletin.

[36]  E. Barratt,et al.  Psychiatric aspects of impulsivity. , 2001, The American journal of psychiatry.

[37]  M. Spoont.  Modulatory role of serotonin in neural information processing: implications for human psychopathology. , 1992, Psychological bulletin.

[38]  A. Bechara.  Decision making, impulse control and loss of willpower to resist drugs: a neurocognitive perspective , 2005, Nature Neuroscience.

[39]  R. Gunn,et al.  Applying a dual process model of self-regulation: The association between executive working memory capacity, negative urgency, and negative mood induction on pre-potent response inhibition. , 2015, Personality and individual differences.

[40]  Sheri L. Johnson,et al.  A profile approach to impulsivity in bipolar disorder: the key role of strong emotions , 2014, Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica.

[41]  R. Depue,et al.  A Behavioral Dimension of Constraint , 1986 .

[42]  J. Block,et al.  The Role of Ego-Control and Ego-Resiliency in the Organization of Behavior , 1980 .

[43]  Gregory T. Smith,et al.  Emotion-based dispositions to rash action: positive and negative urgency. , 2008, Psychological bulletin.

[44]  Sheri L. Johnson,et al.  Serotonin Transporter Polymorphism Interacts With Childhood Adversity to Predict Aspects of Impulsivity , 2011, Psychological science.

[45]  Hannah R. Snyder.  Major depressive disorder is associated with broad impairments on neuropsychological measures of executive function: a meta-analysis and review. , 2013, Psychological bulletin.

[46]  Gregory T. Smith,et al.  Negative Urgency and Lack of Perseverance: Identification of Differential Pathways of Onset and Maintenance Risk in the Longitudinal Prediction of Nonsuicidal Self-Injury. , 2015, Behavior therapy.

[47]  B. Cuthbert.  Research Domain Criteria: toward future psychiatric nosologies , 2015, Dialogues in clinical neuroscience.

[48]  Jennifer A. Silvers,et al.  Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: a meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies. , 2014, Cerebral cortex.

[49]  LATENT SUBSTRATES OF COMPULSIVITY AND BEHAVIOURAL FLEXIBILITY , 2016, European Neuropsychopharmacology.

[50]  J. Patton,et al.  Factor structure of the Barratt impulsiveness scale. , 1995, Journal of clinical psychology.

[51]  P. Dayan,et al.  Uncertainty-based competition between prefrontal and dorsolateral striatal systems for behavioral control , 2005, Nature Neuroscience.

[52]  Susanne Schweizer,et al.  Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review. , 2010, Clinical psychology review.

[53]  Gregory T. Smith,et al.  The Measurement of Dispositions to Rash Action in Children , 2010, Assessment.

[54]  J. Nigg.  On inhibition/disinhibition in developmental psychopathology: views from cognitive and personality psychology and a working inhibition taxonomy. , 2000, Psychological bulletin.

[55]  S. Herpertz,et al.  The Role of Serotonin (5-HT) in Behavioral Control: Findings from Animal Research and Clinical Implications , 2015, The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology.

[56]  Melissa A. Cyders,et al.  Integration of impulsivity and positive mood to predict risky behavior: development and validation of a measure of positive urgency. , 2007, Psychological assessment.

[57]  R. Schachar,et al.  Response inhibition and psychopathology: a meta-analysis of go/no-go task performance. , 2014, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[58]  Sandhya Ramrakha,et al.  The p Factor , 2014, Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[59]  A. Markman,et al.  The Curse of Planning: Dissecting Multiple Reinforcement-Learning Systems by Taxing the Central Executive , 2013 .

[60]  M. Posner,et al.  Developing mechanisms of temperamental effortful control. , 2003, Journal of personality.

[61]  J. Metcalfe,et al.  A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: dynamics of willpower. , 1999, Psychological review.

[62]  Scott O Lilienfeld,et al.  Parsing the heterogeneity of impulsivity: A meta-analytic review of the behavioral implications of the UPPS for psychopathology. , 2015, Psychological assessment.

[63]  B. Hommel,et al.  When Cognitive Control Is Not Adaptive , 2014, Psychological science.

[64]  Melissa A. Cyders,et al.  Mood-based rash action and its components: Positive and negative urgency , 2007 .

[65]  K. Markon,et al.  Toward a theory of distinct types of "impulsive" behaviors: A meta-analysis of self-report and behavioral measures. , 2014, Psychological bulletin.

[66]  Donald R. Lynam,et al.  How do negative emotions impair self-control? A neural model of negative urgency , 2016, NeuroImage.

[67]  Sheri L. Johnson,et al.  Cognitive control training for emotion-related impulsivity. , 2018, Behaviour research and therapy.

[68]  L. Hulvershorn,et al.  Negative urgency and emotion regulation predict positive smoking expectancies in non-smoking youth. , 2016, Addictive behaviors.

[69]  N. Eisenberg.  Emotion-Related Regulation and Its Relation to Quality of Social Functioning , 2014 .

[70]  Sheri L. Johnson,et al.  Major Depressive Disorder and Emotion-Related Impulsivity: Are Both Related to Cognitive Inhibition? , 2018, Cognitive Therapy and Research.

[71]  Gregory T. Smith,et al.  Another look at impulsivity: a meta-analytic review comparing specific dispositions to rash action in their relationship to bulimic symptoms. , 2008, Clinical psychology review.

[72]  M. Fillmore,et al.  Linking impulsivity and inhibitory control using manual and oculomotor response inhibition tasks. , 2011, Acta psychologica.

[73]  Gregory T. Smith,et al.  A Comparison of Two Models of Urgency , 2013, Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[74]  James R. Yancey,et al.  Quantifying Inhibitory Control as Externalizing Proneness: A Cross-Domain Model , 2018 .

[75]  N. Daw,et al.  Characterizing a psychiatric symptom dimension related to deficits in goal-directed control , 2016, eLife.

[76]  S. Dickman,et al.  PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Functional and Dysfunctional Impulsivity: Personality and Cognitive Correlates , 1990 .

[77]  P. Cohen,et al.  Developmental course of impulsivity and capability from age 10 to age 25 as related to trajectory of suicide attempt in a community cohort. , 2011, Suicide & life-threatening behavior.

[78]  F. Toates.  A model of the hierarchy of behaviour, cognition, and consciousness , 2006, Consciousness and Cognition.

[79]  David T. Neal,et al.  A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. , 2007, Psychological review.

[80]  John R. Anderson,et al.  Navigating complex decision spaces: Problems and paradigms in sequential choice. , 2014, Psychological bulletin.

[81]  Peter Dayan,et al.  Simple Substrates for Complex Cognition , 2008, Front. Neurosci..

[82]  T. Insel,et al.  Toward the future of psychiatric diagnosis: the seven pillars of RDoC , 2013, BMC Medicine.

[83]  D. Lynam,et al.  The convergence and divergence of impulsivity facets in daily life. , 2018, Journal of personality.

[84]  E. Willcutt,et al.  Behavioral Disinhibition: Liability for Externalizing Spectrum Disorders and Its Genetic and Environmental Relation to Response Inhibition across Adolescence the Nature and Etiology of Behavioral Disinhibition , 2022 .

[85]  Wendy Wood,et al.  Psychology of Habit. , 2016, Annual review of psychology.

[86]  P. Dayan,et al.  Goals and Habits in the Brain , 2013, Neuron.

[87]  M. Van der Linden,et al.  How is impulsivity related to depression in adolescence? Evidence from a French validation of the cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire. , 2007, Journal of adolescence.

[88]  Sarah F. Fischer,et al.  Impulsivity and motivations to consume alcohol: a prospective study on risk of dependence in young adult women. , 2013, Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research.

[89]  Sheri L. Johnson,et al.  Impulsivity and Suicidality in Adolescent Inpatients , 2016, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology.

[90]  Melissa A. Cyders,et al.  Measurement of constructs using self-report and behavioral lab tasks: is there overlap in nomothetic span and construct representation for impulsivity? , 2011, Clinical psychology review.

[91]  E. Barratt,et al.  Factor Analysis of Some Psychometric Measures of Impulsiveness and Anxiety , 1965, Psychological reports.

[92]  R. Depue.  Neurobiological factors in personality and depression , 1995 .

[93]  Melissa A. Cyders,et al.  Experimental effect of positive urgency on negative outcomes from risk taking and on increased alcohol consumption. , 2010, Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors.

[94]  F. Strack,et al.  Reflective and Impulsive Determinants of Social Behavior , 2004, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[95]  Sheri L. Johnson,et al.  Neurocognitive mechanisms of emotion-related impulsivity: The role of arousal. , 2018, Psychophysiology.

[96]  Jarrod M. Ellingson,et al.  Changes in negative urgency, positive urgency, and sensation seeking across adolescence. , 2016, Personality and individual differences.

[97]  E. Watkins.  Constructive and Unconstructive Repetitive Thought , 2008, Psychological bulletin.

[98]  T. Robbins,et al.  Disruption in the Balance Between Goal-Directed Behavior and Habit Learning in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder , 2011, The American journal of psychiatry.

[99]  K. King,et al.  Urgency and negative emotions: Evidence for moderation on negative alcohol consequences , 2011 .

[100]  E. Bora,et al.  Cognitive endophenotypes of bipolar disorder: a meta-analysis of neuropsychological deficits in euthymic patients and their first-degree relatives. , 2009, Journal of affective disorders.

[101]  N. Marmorstein.  Associations Between Dispositions to Rash Action and Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms in Children , 2013, Journal of clinical child and adolescent psychology : the official journal for the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, American Psychological Association, Division 53.

[102]  D. Javitt,et al.  Cortical thinning, functional connectivity, and mood-related impulsivity in schizophrenia: relationship to aggressive attitudes and behavior. , 2014, The American journal of psychiatry.

[103]  Gregory T. Smith,et al.  Longitudinal test of a developmental model of the transition to early drinking. , 2014, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[104]  J. Buckholtz.  Social norms, self-control, and the value of antisocial behavior , 2015, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.

[105]  Jennifer E. Merrill,et al.  Developmental trends in alcohol use initiation and escalation from early to middle adolescence: Prediction by urgency and trait affect. , 2016, Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors.

[106]  R. Depue,et al.  Neurobiology of the structure of personality: Dopamine, facilitation of incentive motivation, and extraversion , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[107]  T. Robbins,et al.  UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Tryptophan depletion promotes habitual over goal-directed control of appetitive responding in humans , 2015 .

[108]  Gregory T. Smith,et al.  Comparison of Parent Versus Child-Report of Child Impulsivity Traits and Prediction of Outcome Variables , 2013, Journal of psychopathology and behavioral assessment.

[109]  R. Charnigo,et al.  Negative urgency, distress tolerance, and substance abuse among college students. , 2012, Addictive behaviors.

[110]  James J Gross,et al.  Emotion regulation and psychopathology. , 2015, Annual review of clinical psychology.

[111]  R. Baumeister,et al.  High self-control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success. , 2004, Journal of personality.