Anxiety increases sensitivity to errors and negative feedback over time

• Published in: Biological psychology 2021-05, Vol.162, p.108092-108092, Article 108092
• Main Authors: Tobias, Margaret R., Ito, Tiffany A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anxiety; Anxiety Disorders; Depression; Electroencephalography; ERN; ERPs; Error related negativity; Event-related potentials; Evoked Potentials; Feedback; Feedback related negativity; Female; FRN; Humans; Multilevel modeling; Performance monitoring
• ISSN: 0301-0511; 1873-6246
• DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2021.108092

•Sensitivity to negative information is seen behaviorally and neurally in anxiety.•ERPs to negative feedback and errors were examined over time in task.•Feedback and error sensitivity (via ERPs) are better sustained over time in anxiety.•ERPs’ relationship to depression was mixed.•Temporal dynamics of ERP-psychopathology relationships should be further explored. Anxiety is characterized by sensitivity to negative external and internal information, apparent both in symptoms (e.g., hypervigilance and worry) and neural performance monitoring measures (i.e., feedback- and error-related negativity (FRN and ERN)). Here we examine whether anxiety is associated with persistent neural sensitivity to negative performance markers reflected in both the FRN and ERN (n = 273). Higher anxiety was associated with larger responses to both negative feedback and errors as the task progressed compared to those with lower anxiety particularly in women, suggesting that anxiety makes reactions to negative cues more persistent. Similar hypotheses were investigated for depression, which is associated with similar negative cognitive biases and deficits in reward-related processing, but results were mixed. Together, the findings identify variation over time-in-task as an overlooked dimension by which FRN and ERN may serve as a biomarker of anxiety but suggest that depression is not consistently related to performance monitoring.