Suppression of error-preceding brain activity explains exaggerated error monitoring in females with worry

Abstract Anxiety is consistently associated with hyperactive neural responses to errors. The majority of existing research has focused on a single marker of error-elicited brain activity—the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related brain potential (ERP) elicited 50–100 ms following an erroneous response. The ERN has accumulated growing interest for its use in clinical contexts as a potential biomarker and/or endophenotype. However, it is unknown whether anxiety’s effects are specific to brain activity following erroneous responses; anxiety may affect processes prior to error commission, suggesting that the ERN might reflect the output of abnormal processing that begins before an error. Here, we examined the error-preceding positivity (EPP) – an ERP time-locked to the correct response immediately before errors – that reflects a gradual disengagement of task-focused attention preceding errors. Results revealed that female worriers demonstrated significantly attenuated EPP amplitude, indicating reduced pre-error disengagement. Moreover, reduced EPP mediated the relationship between worry and the enhanced ERN following errors. These results suggest that the temporal dynamics of anxiety’s impact on error processing are more nuanced than previously thought such that effects emerge prior to the actual occurrence of an erroneous response.