Negative inhibition is poor in sub-threshold depression individuals: Evidence from ERP and a Go/No-go task

•Chinese words as the experimental material was used in this study.•The classical Go/No-go paradigm combined with ERP technology was used in this study.•Negative words were used as “Go” stimulus and “No-go” stimulus respectively in two experiments.•At the EEG level, the N2 was measured at frontal and frontal-central electrodes (Fz, Cz, FCz), the P3 was measured at central, central-parietal and parietal electrodes(Cz, Pz, CPz), electrodes for the N2 and P3 were chosen based on previous studies.•SD showed the same poor negative inhibition as depressed patients on behavioral data, and responded more quickly to negative stimuli than CG.•Compared with neutral emotion information, negative emotion information will reduce attention control in conflict processing, lead to faster conflict processing, attract attention, occupy more cognitive resources, and be more difficult to inhibit. In this study, Go/No-go task combined with ERP technology were used to explore the characteristics of negative emotion inhibition in SD and healthy individuals and whether there are differences between negative emotion inhibition and neutral emotion inhibition in SD. The results showed that SD showed the same poor negative inhibition as depressive patients in behavior, but there was no significant difference between SD and CG in ERPs. Overall, compared with neutral emotional information, negative emotional information would reduce attention control in conflict processing, lead to faster conflict processing, attract attention, occupy more cognitive resources, and be more difficult to inhibit. It is concluded that the negative attention bias of SD individuals is only reflected in the bottom-up stimulation processing, but has not developed into the top-down cognitive control, which also suggests that the corresponding intervention measures at the early stage of depression may have better effects.