Anxiety disrupts the evaluative component of performance monitoring: An ERP study

Abstract

Thirty low and 30 high anxious participants performed a speeded Go/noGo task during which they had to rely on evaluative feedback to infer whether their actions were timely (correct) or not. We focused on FRN, an ERP component that is sensitive to the valence of feedback. Depending on the context, neutral faces served either as positive or negative feedback. Whereas the FRN of low anxious individuals did discriminate between neutral faces when used either as positive or negative feedback, the FRN of high anxious individuals did not. However, before the FRN, we also found evidence for a differential perceptual effect at the level of the N170 face-specific component between the two feedback conditions, equally so in low and high anxious individuals. These results suggest that anxiety disrupts selectively the evaluative component of performance monitoring, which presumably allows to ascribe a given value (either positive or negative) to actions.