Abstract
•Emotion-triggered impulsivity (ERI) is robustly correlated with psychopathology.•We expected ERI to be related to difficulties during high emotional arousal.•We coded speech errors as people completed a speech on a controversial topic.•Emotion-triggered impulsivity related to speech repair errors during high arousal.•Findings suggest a novel behavioral outcome related to this form of impulsivity.
Emotion-triggered impulsivity is robustly tied to psychopathologies. We hypothesized that one form of emotion-triggered impulsivity, Feelings Trigger Action, would be correlated with speech disfluencies during high arousal. Participants with a range of internalizing and externalizing symptoms completed a stressful speech task in which they were videorecorded while discussing a controversial topic. Skin conductance was gathered toindexarousal. Consistent with hypotheses, Feelings Trigger Action scores related to modestly higher levels of speech repairs when participants were experiencing relatively higher arousal (N = 198). There was some evidence that a second form of emotion-triggered impulsivity also related to more speech errors during high arousal. Findings provide early evidence that speech disfluencies might be one manifestation of emotion-triggered impulsivity. Limitations and direction for future research are considered.