Anxiety and feedback negativity

Abstract

It has been suggested that anxious individuals are more prone to feel that negative outcomes are particularly extreme and to interpret ambiguous outcomes as negative compared to nonanxious individuals. Previous studies have demonstrated that the feedback negativity (FN) component of event-related brain potential (ERP) is sensitive to outcome evaluation and outcome expectancy. Hence, we predicted that the FN should be different between high trait-anxiety (HTA) and low trait-anxiety (LTA) individuals. To test our hypothesis, the ERPs were recorded during a simple monetary gambling task. The FN was measured as a difference wave created across conditions. We found that the amplitude of the FN indicating negative versus positive outcomes was significantly larger for LTA individuals compared to HTA individuals. However, there was no significant difference in the FN between groups in response to ambiguous versus positive outcomes. The results indicate that there is a relationship between the FN and individual differences in anxiety. We suggest that these results reflect the impact of anxiety on outcome expectation. Our results challenge the reinforcement learning theory of error-related negativity, which proposes that ERN and FN reflect the same cognitive process.