Post-error Brain Activity Correlates With Incidental Memory for Negative Words

A network analysis of affective and motivational individual differences and error monitoring in a non-clinical sample

Error monitoring, which plays a crucial role in shaping adaptive behavior, is influenced by a complex interplay of affective and motivational factors. Understanding these associations often proves challenging due to the intricate nature of these variables. With the aim of addressing previous inconsistencies and methodological gaps, in this study, we utilized network analysis to investigate the relationship between affective and motivational individual differences and error monitoring. We employed six Gaussian Graphical Models on a non-clinical population ($N$ = 236) to examine the conditional dependence between the amplitude of response-related potentials (error-related negativity; correct-related negativity) and 29 self-report measures related to anxiety, depression, obsessive thoughts, compulsive behavior, and motivation while adjusting for covariates: age, handedness, and latency of error-related negativity and correct-related negativity. We then validated our results on an independent sample of 107 participants. Our findings revealed unique associations between error-related negativity amplitudes and specific traits. Notably, more pronounced error-related negativity amplitudes were associated with increased rumination and obsessing, and decreased reward sensitivity. Importantly, in our non-clinical sample, error-related negativity was not directly associated with trait anxiety. These results underscore the nuanced effects of affective and motivational traits on error processing in healthy population.

The bidirectional influence between emotional language and inhibitory control in Chinese: An ERP study

The bidirectional influence between emotional language and inhibitory processes has been studied in alphabetic languages, highlighting the need for additional investigation in nonalphabetic languages to explore potential cross-linguistic differences. The present ERP study investigated the bidirectional influence in the context of Mandarin, a language with unique linguistic features and neural substrates. In Experiment 1, emotional adjectives preceded the Go/NoGo cue. The ERPs revealed that negative emotional language facilitated inhibitory control. In Experiment 2, with a Go/NoGo cue preceding the emotional language, the study confirmed that inhibitory control facilitated the semantic integration of negative language in Chinese, whereas the inhibited state may not affect deeper refinement of the emotional content. However, no interaction was observed in positive emotional language processing. These results suggest an interaction between inhibitory control and negative emotional language processing in Chinese, supporting the integrative emotion-cognition view.

Socially Induced Negative Emotions Elicit Neural Activity in the Mentalizing Network in a Subsequent Inhibitory Task

Despite the growing emphasis on embedding interactive social paradigms in the field of cognitive and affective neuroscience, the impact of socially induced emotions on cognition remains widely unknown. The aim of the present study was to fill this gap by testing whether facial stimuli whose emotional valence was acquired through social learning in an economic trust game may influence cognitive performance in a subsequent stop-signal task. The study was designed as a conceptual replication of previous event-related potential experiments, extending them to more naturalistic settings. We hypothesized that response inhibition to briefly presented faces of negative and positive game partners would be enhanced on the behavioral and neural levels as compared to trials with a neutral player. The results revealed that the trust game was an effective paradigm for the induction of differently valenced emotions towards players; however, behavioral inhibitory performance was comparable in all stop-signal conditions. On the neural level, we found decreased P3 amplitude in negative trials due to significantly stronger activation in the right frontoparietal control network, which is involved in theory-of-mind operations and underlies social abilities in humans, especially memory-guided inference of others' mental states. Our findings make an important contribution to the cognition-emotion literature by showing that social interactions that take place during an economic game may influence brain activity within the mentalizing network in a subsequent cognitive task.

Religious fundamentalism is associated with hyperactive performance monitoring: ERP evidence from correct and erroneous responses

The aim of the current study was to examine whether action monitoring is associated with religious fundamentalism. Participants performed a stop-signal task that required response inhibition to a simple auditory tone. The level of their religious fundamentalism was measured on a scale. Analysis with mixed-effects linear models revealed significantly larger error-related negativity, correct-related negativity, and post-error positivity components in individuals scoring higher on religious fundamentalism, pointing to their increased engagement in response monitoring. However, it was not accompanied by improved behavioral performance. The electrophysiological results of our study suggest that individuals high in religious fundamentalism engage more in monitoring for conflict between outcomes of their actions and standards of correct behavior. Our findings also point to a possible association between a fundamentalist mindset and higher levels of negative affect, uncertainty, anxiety, and distress, as measured by response-related brain activity.