The hierarchical structure of error-related negativities elicited from affective and social stimuli and their relations to personality traits.

T Suzuki,D B Samuel,K D Novak,D Foti,B Ait Oumeziane

doi:10.1017/pen.2020.15

Abstract

Psychophysiological measures have become increasingly accessible to researchers and many have properties that indicate their use as individual difference indicators. For example, the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related potential (ERP) thought to reflect error-monitoring processes, has been related to individual differences, such as Neuroticism and Conscientiousness traits. Although various tasks have been used to elicit the ERN, only a few studies have investigated its variability across tasks when examining the relations between the ERN and personality traits. In this project, we examined the relations of the ERN elicited from four variants of the Flanker task (Arrow, Social, Unpleasant, and Pleasant) that were created to maximize the differences in their relevance to personality traits. A sample of 93 participants with a history of treatment for psychopathology completed the four tasks as well as self-report measures of the general and maladaptive five-factor model (FFM) traits. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) of ERN amplitudes indicated that three of the four tasks (Arrow, Social, and Unpleasant) were unidimensional. Another set of CFAs indicated that a general factor underlies the ERN elicited from all tasks as well as unique task-specific variances. The correlations of estimated latent ERN scores and personality traits did not reflect the hypothesized correlation patterns. Variability across tasks and the hierarchical model of the ERN may aid in understanding psychopathology dimensions and in informing future endeavors integrating the psychophysiological methods into the study of personality. Recommendations for future research on psychophysiological indicators as individual differences are discussed.

Highlights

Methods of assessing individual differences in physiological and neurological processes are becoming increasingly available to personality and psychopathology researchers (DeYoung et al, 2010; Hyatt et al, 2019; Luu, Collins, & Tucker, 2000; Olvet & Hajcak, 2008)
By examining five models dropping one unit at a time, dropping either Unit 2 or 4 resulted in good fitting models and Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) indicated that dropping Unit 4 was the preferred model, which was retained for the rest of the analyses
The current manuscript tested the assumptions of error-related negativity (ERN) and examined its hierarchical structure as well as the uniqueness of the ERN amplitudes elicited from different tasks

Summary

Introduction

Methods of assessing individual differences in physiological and neurological processes are becoming increasingly available to personality and psychopathology researchers (DeYoung et al, 2010; Hyatt et al, 2019; Luu, Collins, & Tucker, 2000; Olvet & Hajcak, 2008). The main practical advantage of ERPs is its substantially lower cost of data collection compared to other measures of brain activity, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) This facilitates the collection of sample sizes needed for the correlational analyses often used in personality research. Individual differences in ERN amplitudes could reflect one of these performance monitoring mechanisms or other cognitive processes These theories do not explain the effects of motivation on the ERN, such as the modulating effect of monetary incentives on ERN amplitudes (Hajcak, Moser, Yeung, & Simons, 2005; Olvet & Hajcak, 2008). In order to consolidate past cognitive and individual differences findings, the ERN has recently been theorized to reflect defensive reactivity when making an error, which motivates and facilitates adjustments in behavior to maintain effective performance (Weinberg, Riesel, & Hajcak, 2011). This conceptualization of the ERN, as reflecting individual differences in motivation to reduce making errors, could facilitate linking the ERN to the broader personality literature

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