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Many clinical neuroscience investigations have suggested that trait anxiety is associated with increased neural reactivity to mistakes in the form of an event-related potential called the error-related negativity (ERN). Several recent meta-analyses indicated that the anxiety-ERN association was of a small-to-medium effect size, however, these prior investigations did not comprehensively adjust effect sizes for publication bias. Here, in an updated meta-analysis (k = 58, N = 3819), we found support for an uncorrected effect size of r = -0.19, and applied a range of methods to test for and correct publication bias (trim-and-fill, PET, PEESE, Peters' test, three-parameter selection model). The majority of bias-correction methods suggested that the correlation between anxiety and the ERN is non-zero, but smaller than the uncorrected effect size (average adjusted effect size: r = -0.12, range: r = -0.05 to -0.18). Moderation analyses also revealed more robust effects for clinical anxiety and anxious samples characterised by worry, however, it should be noted that these larger effects were also associated with elevated indicators of publication bias relative to the overall analysis. Mixed anxiety and sub-clinical anxiety were not associated with the amplitude of the ERN. Our results suggest that the anxiety-ERN relationship survives multiple corrections for publication bias, albeit not among all sub-types and populations of anxiety. Nevertheless, only 50% of the studies included in our analysis reported significant results, indicating that future research exploring the anxiety-ERN relationship would benefit from increased statistical power., (Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

A growing body of work in social and affective neuroscience suggests that emotion plays an instrumental role in error monitoring processes, rather than only a moderating one. High-powered replications of studies that support this idea, however, are lacking. Here, we attempted a preregistered replication of our own study that had provided evidence for the functional role of emotions in error monitoring: that a neural signal of error monitoring-the error-related negativity-is reduced when participants undergo a misattribution of arousal procedure (Inzlicht & Al-Khindi, 2012). Like a previous replication attempt (Rodilla et al, 2016), our misattribution procedure failed to reduce the amplitude of the ERN. However, it also failed its manipulation check to reduce state anxiety, limiting the conclusions we can draw. Nonetheless, these findings are consistent with the view that our original study may have been a false positive. We discuss these findings in the context of the replication crisis in psychology and of work on the emotional properties of the ERN., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Conservatives are often thought to have a negativity bias-responding more intensely to negative than positive information. Yet, recent research has found that greater endorsement of conservative beliefs follows from both positive and negative emotion inductions. This suggests that the role of affect in political thought may not be restricted to negative valence, and more attention should be given to how conservatives and liberals respond to a wider range of stimulation. In this vein, we examined neural responses to a full range of affective stimuli, allowing us to examine how self-reported ideology moderated these responses. Specifically, we explored the relationship between political orientation and 2 event-related potentials (1 late and 1 early) previously shown to covary with the subjective motivational salience of stimuli-in response to photographs with standardized ratings of arousal and valence. At late time points, conservatives exhibited sustained heightened reactivity, compared with liberals, specifically in response to relatively unarousing and neutral stimuli. At early time points, conservatives exhibited somewhat enhanced neural activity in response to all stimulus types compared with liberals. These results may suggest that conservatives experience a wide variety of stimuli in their environment with increased motivational salience, including positive, neutral, and low-arousal stimuli. No effects of valence were found in this investigation. Such findings have implications for the development and refinement of psychological conceptions of political orientation. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).)

Acetaminophen has recently been recognized as having impacts that extend into the affective domain. In particular, double blind placebo controlled trials have revealed that acetaminophen reduces the magnitude of reactivity to social rejection, frustration, dissonance and to both negatively and positively valenced attitude objects. Given this diversity of consequences, it has been proposed that the psychological effects of acetaminophen may reflect a widespread blunting of evaluative processing. We tested this hypothesis using event-related potentials (ERPs). Sixty-two participants received acetaminophen or a placebo in a double-blind protocol and completed the Go/NoGo task. Participants' ERPs were observed following errors on the Go/NoGo task, in particular the error-related negativity (ERN; measured at FCz) and error-related positivity (Pe; measured at Pz and CPz). Results show that acetaminophen inhibits the Pe, but not the ERN, and the magnitude of an individual's Pe correlates positively with omission errors, partially mediating the effects of acetaminophen on the error rate. These results suggest that recently documented affective blunting caused by acetaminophen may best be described as an inhibition of evaluative processing. They also contribute to the growing work suggesting that the Pe is more strongly associated with conscious awareness of errors relative to the ERN., (© The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

It has recently been suggested that gratitude can benefit self-regulation by reducing impulsivity during economic decision making. We tested if comparable benefits of gratitude are observed for neural performance monitoring and conflict-driven self-control. In a pre-post design, 61 participants were randomly assigned to either a gratitude or happiness condition, and then performed a pre-induction flanker task. Subsequently, participants recalled an autobiographical event where they had felt grateful or happy, followed by a post-induction flanker task. Despite closely following existing protocols, participants in the gratitude condition did not report elevated gratefulness compared to the happy group. In regard to self-control, we found no association between gratitude--operationalized by experimental condition or as a continuous predictor--and any control metric, including flanker interference, post-error adjustments, or neural monitoring (the error-related negativity, ERN). Thus, while gratitude might increase economic patience, such benefits may not generalize to conflict-driven control processes.

The present study investigated the neural responses to errors in a shooting game - and how these neural responses may relate to behavioral performance - by examining the ERP components related to error detection (error-related negativity; ERN) and error awareness (error-related positivity; Pe). The participants completed a Shooter go/no-go task, which required them to shoot at armed targets using a gaming gun, and avoid shooting innocent non-targets. The amplitude of the ERN and Pe was greater for shooting errors than correct shooting responses. The ERN and Pe amplitudes elicited by incorrect shooting appeared to have good internal reliability. The ERN and Pe amplitudes elicited by shooting behaviors also predicted better behavioral sensitivity towards shoot/don't-shoot stimuli. These results suggest that it is possible to obtain online brain response measures to shooting responses and that neural responses to shooting are predictive of behavioral responses., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Conservatives, compared to liberals, are consistently found to exhibit physiological sensitivity to aversive stimuli. However, it remains unknown whether conservatives are also sensitive to salient positively valenced stimuli. We therefore used event-related potentials to determine the relationship between system justification (SJ), a fundamental component of conservative political ideology, and neural processing of negative and positive feedback. Participants (N = 29) filled out questionnaire assessments of SJ. Feedback-related negativity (FRN), an event-related potential component thought to index activity in neural regions associated with reward processing, was assessed in response to positive and negative feedback on a time estimation task. A significant interaction was noted between SJ and feedback type in predicting FRN. Simple effects tests suggested that SJ predicted greater FRN in response to positive but not to negative feedback. Conservatives may experience salient positive information with a heightened intensity., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.)

Considerable research has disclosed how cognitive reappraisals and the modulation of emotional responses promote successful emotion regulation. Less research has examined how the early processing of emotion-relevant stimuli may create divergent emotional response consequences. Mindfulness--a receptive, non-evaluative form of attention--is theorized to foster emotion regulation, and the present study examined whether individual differences in mindfulness would modulate neural responses associated with the early processing of affective stimuli. Focus was on the late positive potential (LPP) of the event-related brain potential to visual stimuli varying in emotional valence and arousal. This study first found, replicating past research, that high arousal images, particularly of an unpleasant type, elicited larger LPP responses. Second, the study found that more mindful individuals showed lower LPP responses to high arousal unpleasant images, even after controlling for trait attentional control. Conversely, two traits contrasting with mindfulness--neuroticism and negative affectivity--were associated with higher LPP responses to high arousal unpleasant images. Finally, mindfulness was also associated with lower LPP responses to motivationally salient pleasant images (erotica). These findings suggest that mindfulness modulates neural responses in an early phase of affective processing, and contribute to understanding how this quality of attention may promote healthy emotional functioning.

Self-affirmation produces large effects: Even a simple reminder of one's core values reduces defensiveness against threatening information. But how, exactly, does self-affirmation work? We explored this question by examining the impact of self-affirmation on neurophysiological responses to threatening events. We hypothesized that because self-affirmation increases openness to threat and enhances approachability of unfavorable feedback, it should augment attention and emotional receptivity to performance errors. We further hypothesized that this augmentation could be assessed directly, at the level of the brain. We measured self-affirmed and nonaffirmed participants' electrophysiological responses to making errors on a task. As we anticipated, self-affirmation elicited greater error responsiveness than did nonaffirmation, as indexed by the error-related negativity, a neural signal of error monitoring. Self-affirmed participants also performed better on the task than did nonaffirmed participants. We offer novel brain evidence that self-affirmation increases openness to threat and discuss the role of error detection in the link between self-affirmation and performance.

In two studies, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to test whether approach-motivation-related brain activity would predict reduced sensitivity to negative outcomes. In both studies, participants (Study 1, N=26; Study 2, N=56) were first recorded for baseline EEG to measure approach-related left frontal EEG activity. They then completed either the color-naming Stroop task (Study 1) or the Multi-Source Interference Task (Study 2) to measure error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related potential that has been associated with aversive motivation and distress. In both studies, higher leftward frontal EEG asymmetry predicted reduced ERN amplitude. Hierarchical regression analyses of the separate frontal nodes that comprised the asymmetry score further showed that left frontal activity predicted reduced ERN amplitude whereas right frontal activity predicted greater ERN amplitude. Results have implications for understanding emotion and motivation and for understanding the personal resilience associated with approach motivated states., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)