The effect of anxiety on emotional recognition: evidence from an ERP study

Bo Wang,Qian Zhuang,Xingze Liu,Meng Zhang,Qianqian Yu,Guang Zhao

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-34289-8

Bo Wang, Qian Zhuang + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-34289-8

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Abstract

Anxiety-related bias in the recognition memory based on trait anxiety has induced some studies. Their results, however, were conflicting. In fact, anxious differences not only differed from personality traits but also from different anxiety mood levels. We explored the emotional memory bias in both trait and state anxiety individuals, the high trait and high state anxiety group, the high trait and low state anxiety group, the low trait and high state anxiety group, and the low trait and low state anxiety group, on classic recognition paradigm using event-related potentials (ERPs). The behavioral results showed high state anxiety levels increased the d’ of negative words, regardless of the trait anxiety of participant is high or low, and a lower d’ of recognition memory for negative words than for neutral and positive words in all participants. Moreover, Electrophysiological results supported the findings of behavior, showing an earlier N400 (250–500 ms) latency elicited for new-negative words in high state level than in low state levels in right parietal region. These results suggested that the memory bias to negative events resides in state anxiety, but not in trait anxiety.

Highlights

Anxiety is anticipation of future threat, it’s more often associated with muscle tension and vigilance in preparation for future danger and cautious or avoidant behaviors, some the level of anxiety is reduced by pervasive avoidance behaviors[1,2]
Subsequent simple effect analyses showed that significant differences between high state anxiety group and calm group about the d’ were found of negative words (F (1, 67) = 20.16, p < 0.01), but not in neutral and positive words, showing that the memory recognition processing was different to negative words and the other two groups’ words
There was no significant difference between positive words and neutral words, but the d’ of negative words was smaller than positive words and neutral words

Summary

Introduction

Anxiety is anticipation of future threat, it’s more often associated with muscle tension and vigilance in preparation for future danger and cautious or avoidant behaviors, some the level of anxiety is reduced by pervasive avoidance behaviors[1,2]. The correlation is very high between trait and state anxiety, many studies had found that the effect of state anxiety was stronger than trait anxiety to task performance[25,26,27], a behavioral research found that the effect of recognition negative biases was state anxiety alone, not trait anxiety[12]. The factor, state anxiety levels (e.g. high vs low), might affect the size and direction of threat bias in recognition tasks[21,28]. Given the stronger effect of state anxiety than trait anxiety to task performance[25,26,27], and relatively stable personality of the trait anxiety, high trait individuals might induce higher state anxiety compared to low trait anxiety individuals, we predicted state anxiety is an intervening variable between trait anxiety and emotional valence events. Thence, the index of parietal N400 might be sensitive and effective to emotional words in present study

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