Emotions have recently been shown to interfere with the efficacy of inhibitory control. However,
understanding their impact requires taking into account that inhibition is not a unitary construct, but
consists of distinct functions underlain by specific mechanisms. In this study, 88 participants
performed two emotional versions of classic laboratory tasks designed to assess (1) the ability to inhibit
a prepotent response (a stop-signal task using faces with different emotional expressions) and (2) the
capacity to resist the effect of proactive interference (PI; a recent negative task that included emotional
words). Overall results showed that emotional stimuli interfered with inhibition capacities in both
tasks. Although tending in the same direction, these results suggest that different underlying
mechanisms (e.g., top-down vs. bottom-up processes) or consecutive differences in emotional
processing (e.g., different interactions with stimulus/task properties, processing stages or motivational
aspects) are at play in these two inhibition-related functions.