Tim P. Moran

On the relationship between anxiety and error monitoring: a meta-analysis and conceptual framework

Research involving event-related brain potentials has revealed that anxiety is associated with enhanced error monitoring, as reflected in increased amplitude of the error-related negativity (ERN). The nature of the relationship between anxiety and error monitoring is unclear, however. Through meta-analysis and a critical review of the literature, we argue that anxious apprehension/worry is the dimension of anxiety most closely associated with error monitoring. Although, overall, anxiety demonstrated a robust, “small-to-medium” relationship with enhanced ERN (r = −0.25), studies employing measures of anxious apprehension show a threefold greater effect size estimate (r = −0.35) than those utilizing other measures of anxiety (r = −0.09). Our conceptual framework helps explain this more specific relationship between anxiety and enhanced ERN and delineates the unique roles of worry, conflict processing, and modes of cognitive control. Collectively, our analysis suggests that enhanced ERN in anxiety results from the interplay of a decrease in processes supporting active goal maintenance and a compensatory increase in processes dedicated to transient reactivation of task goals on an as-needed basis when salient events (i.e., errors) occur.

The psychometric properties of the late positive potential during emotion processing and regulation.

The late positive potential (LPP) is a commonly used event-related potential (ERP) in the study of emotion and emotion regulation. The LPP has also been evaluated as a neural marker of affective psychopathology. The psychometric properties of this component have not been examined, however. The current study was conducted with the aim of addressing two questions: how internally consistent is the LPP, and how many trials are necessary to obtain a stable LPP? Fifty-eight participants completed an emotion regulation task. First, split-half reliabilities were computed for the LPP and for difference waves revealing emotion effects (negative minus neutral) and regulation effects (reappraise minus negative). Second, averages including progressively more trials were evaluated and compared to overall participant averages. These data indicated good-to-excellent reliability for neutral, negative and reappraise trials, as well as difference waves. Furthermore, the LPP varies little after 8 trials are added to the average and the difference waves vary little after 12 trials are included. Together, the findings of the current study suggest that the LPP demonstrates good internal consistency and can be adequately quantified with relatively few trials.

Parsing relationships between dimensions of anxiety and action monitoring brain potentials in female undergraduates

Anxiety is associated with enhanced action monitoring. Research to date, however, has employed extreme group designs that fail to address the full spectrum of anxiety, and in which overlapping and co-occurring symptoms obscure the exact nature of the relationships between anxiety and action monitoring. To address these limitations, relationships between distinct dimensions of anxiety and neural indicators of action monitoring were examined in a sample of female undergraduates. Results revealed that higher anxious apprehension (i.e., worry) was associated with enhanced early action monitoring activity, as indexed by the error-related negativity/correct-response negativity. Anxious arousal (i.e., somatic tension) on the other hand, was unrelated to measures of action monitoring. These findings suggest that the anxiety-action monitoring link holds along the continuum of severity and is specific to the worry component of anxiety.

Mind Perception: Real but Not Artificial Faces Sustain Neural Activity beyond the N170/VPP

Faces are visual objects that hold special significance as the icons of other minds. Previous researchers using event-related potentials (ERPs) have found that faces are uniquely associated with an increased N170/vertex positive potential (VPP) and a more sustained frontal positivity. Here, we examined the processing of faces as objects vs. faces as cues to minds by contrasting images of faces possessing minds (human faces), faces lacking minds (doll faces), and non-face objects (i.e., clocks). Although both doll and human faces were associated with an increased N170/VPP from 175–200 ms following stimulus onset, only human faces were associated with a sustained positivity beyond 400 ms. Our data suggest that the N170/VPP reflects the object-based processing of faces, whether of dolls or humans; on the other hand, the later positivity appears to uniquely index the processing of human faces—which are more salient and convey information about identity and the presence of other minds.

Mind Your Errors Evidence for a Neural Mechanism Linking Growth Mind-Set to Adaptive Posterror Adjustments

How well people bounce back from mistakes depends on their beliefs about learning and intelligence. For individuals with a growth mind-set, who believe intelligence develops through effort, mistakes are seen as opportunities to learn and improve. For individuals with a fixed mind-set, who believe intelligence is a stable characteristic, mistakes indicate lack of ability. We examined performance-monitoring event-related potentials (ERPs) to probe the neural mechanisms underlying these different reactions to mistakes. Findings revealed that a growth mind-set was associated with enhancement of the error positivity component (Pe), which reflects awareness of and allocation of attention to mistakes. More growth-minded individuals also showed superior accuracy after mistakes compared with individuals endorsing a more fixed mind-set. It is critical to note that Pe amplitude mediated the relationship between mind-set and posterror accuracy. These results suggest that neural mechanisms indexing on-line awareness of and attention to mistakes are intimately involved in growth-minded individuals’ ability to rebound from mistakes.

Electrocortical responses to NIMSTIM facial expressions of emotion

Emotional faces are motivationally salient stimuli that automatically capture attention and rapidly potentiate neural processing. Because of their superior temporal resolution, scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) are ideal for examining rapid changes in neural activity. Some reports have found larger ERPs for fearful and angry faces compared with both neutral and other emotional faces, and a key aim of the present study was to assess neural response to multiple emotional expressions using the NIMSTIM. Importantly, no study has yet systematically evaluated neural activity and self-report ratings for multiple NIMSTIM expressions. Study 1 examined the time-course of electrocortical activity in response to fearful, angry, sad, happy, and neutral NIMSTIM faces. In Study 2, valence and arousal ratings were collected for the same faces in a separate sample. In line with previous findings, the early P1 was larger for fearful compared with neutral faces. The vertex positivity (VPP) was enhanced for fearful, angry, and happy expressions compared to neutral. There was no effect of expression on the N170. Marginally significant enhancements were observed for all expressions during the early posterior negativity (EPN). The late positive potential (LPP) was enhanced only for fearful and angry faces. All emotional expressions were rated as more arousing and more pleasant/unpleasant than neutral expressions. Overall, findings suggest that angry and fearful faces might be especially potent in terms of eliciting ERP responses and ideal for emotion research when more evocative images cannot be used.

Enhanced attentional capture in trait anxiety.

Attentional Control Theory (ACT) proposes that anxiety is specifically associated with more attentional distraction by salient stimuli. Moreover, there is some suggestion that worry is one mechanism whereby anxiety impairs attentional control. However, direct evidence for these hypotheses is lacking. In the current study we addressed limitations of previous work by examining the relationships between trait anxiety and worry and attentional distraction by a salient, task-irrelevant color singleton in a visual search task. Results revealed that trait anxiety, but not worry, was related to increased attentional distraction (i.e., capture) by the color singleton. The current results suggest that anxiety is associated with a general enhancement of bottom-up processes involved in motivational significance detection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Anxiety and working memory capacity: A meta-analysis and narrative review.

Cognitive deficits are now widely recognized to be an important component of anxiety. In particular, anxiety is thought to restrict the capacity of working memory by competing with task-relevant processes. The evidence for this claim, however, has been mixed. Although some studies have found restricted working memory in anxiety, others have not. Within studies that have found impairments, there is little agreement regarding the boundary conditions of the anxiety/WMC association. The aim of this review is to critically evaluate the evidence for anxiety-related deficits in working memory capacity. First, a meta-analysis of 177 samples (N = 22,061 individuals) demonstrated that self-reported measures of anxiety are reliably related to poorer performance on measures of working memory capacity (g = -.334, p < 10-29). This finding was consistent across complex span (e.g., OSPAN; g = -.342, k = 30, N = 3,196, p = .000001), simple span (e.g., digit span; g = -.318, k = 127, N = 17,547, p < 10-17), and dynamic span tasks (e.g., N-Back; g = -.437, k = 20, N = 1,318, p = .000003). Second, a narrative review of the literature revealed that anxiety, whether self-reported or experimentally induced, is related to poorer performance across a wide variety of tasks. Finally, the review identified a number of methodological limitations common in the literature as well as avenues for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record

Neural Markers of Positive Reappraisal and Their Associations With Trait Reappraisal and Worry

Positively reinterpreting negative experiences is important for psychological well-being and represents a key mechanism of cognitive-behavioral therapies for emotional problems. Yet, little is known about the neural mechanisms that underlie this process and how they relate to clinically relevant individual differences. Here we demonstrate using event-related potentials (ERPs) that positively reappraising distress-inducing images is associated with early increases in frontal control activity and later decreases in parietal arousal-related activity. Moreover, we show that peoples chronic tendencies to reappraise versus worry modulate neural activity in opposing directions--trait reappraisal predicts decreases in parietal arousal-related activity during positive reappraisal implementation whereas worry predicts increases in the same waveform. These findings provide novel insights into the neural time course of positive reappraisal. They also speak to the potential clinical utility of neurophysiological measures as relatively inexpensive, noninvasive biomarkers that could serve as risk indicators and treatment mediators.

Sex moderates the relationship between worry and performance monitoring brain activity in undergraduates

Research suggests that abnormal performance-monitoring contributes to the etiology and maintenance of anxious pathology. Moreover, the anxiety-performance monitoring relationship appears to be specific to the worry dimension of anxiety. Given that anxiety (and worry in particular) is twice as prevalent in women as men, and most studies to date have employed small samples which are underpowered to detect sex-differences, it is possible that sex may be an important moderator of the worry-performance-monitoring relationship. No studies have directly compared the worry-performance-monitoring relationship between men and women, however. In the current study, we extended our recent work showing a unique relationship between worry and performance monitoring brain potentials in female undergraduates by comparing this relationship to that between worry and performance-monitoring brain potentials in male participants. Seventy-nine female and 70 male undergraduates from an ongoing study of anxiety and performance monitoring performed a letter-flanker task while their brain activity was recorded. Results revealed that worry was associated with exaggerated performance-monitoring, as indexed by increased error-related negativity/correct-response negativity, in female, but not male undergraduates. These findings suggest that the functional relationship between worry and performance-monitoring is sex-specific and have implications for understanding the role of performance-monitoring in the development and maintenance of anxiety. Specifically, linking the worry-performance-monitoring relationship to other female-specific biopsychosocial factors represents an important direction for future research.