A team of researchers in Texas A&M University’s department of psychological and brain sciences and the Texas A&M Institute for Neuroscience released a study earlier this year in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science.
The team used EEG (electroencephalography, a non-invasive approach that measures electrical signals from the brain, recorded at the scalp) to measure people’s internal response to having made an error. They found that people who had heightened elaborative error processing showed greater everyday avoidance one year later. However, this was especially true for people who began to avoid error processing over that same year, as measured by smaller early EEG responses associated with error detection.
Excessive error processing in children is a risk factor for developing anxiety disorders, but little is known about its role in risk for new onset or worsening of anxiety disorders in adults.
Participants in the study were 74 individuals with anxiety or depression. To measure the brain’s response to errors, they were asked to complete a flanker task, in which they pressed a button to quickly identify the direction of a middle arrow in a sequence of arrows (e.g. “>>>>>>”). Sometimes, the middle arrow switched directions unexpectedly, which tends to lead people to make errors. Participants performed the task twice: once to provide a baseline, and again one year later to measure changes in error-processing.
This work was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (Grant No. R01MH125083, awarded to Dr. Annmarie MacNamara).