Electrophysiological markers for hostile attribution bias among individuals with anxiety
Background: Anxiety disorders constitute the most prevalent subgroup of mental health conditions. While anxious individuals are more widely known as being socially withdrawn and shy, recent research highlights a rather non-prototypical image, one that is aggressive. The main goal of this event-related brain potentials (ERPs) study is to augment our knowledge of the neurophysiological responding of hostile attribution biases of anxious individuals to ambiguous situations. Methods: Using pre-collected data from a sample of 68 undergraduate and community-based adult participants, this study aims to explore the N400 deflection utilising Gagnon et al.’s (2016) Hostile Expectancy Violation Paradigm with anxious individuals, and whether the N400 deflection persists after controlling for aggression. Results: A more negative amplitude was observed in response to a critical word that mismatched rather than matched with the character’s expected hostile intention. Regression analyses revealed that anxiety scores negatively predicted the N400 following the mismatched expected hostile intention while controlling for reactive aggression suggesting that the violation of hostile expectancy about the intention behind an ambiguous provocative behavior is more pronounced among anxious participants. Conversely, in the hostile condition, the overall model was significant, although anxiety scores did not account for the overall effect, reactive aggression did. Conclusion: This study provides preliminary evidence that anxiety symptoms are uniquely related to hostile attribution bias independent of reactive aggression. Future research should aim to replicate these findings with a clinically diagnosed sample of individuals with anxiety disorders.
Anxiety Aggression Hostile Attribution Bias N400 Hostile Expectancy Violation Paradigm Electrophysiology