No abstract

Research on action monitoring and error processing has begun to consider the role of emotion, motivation, and peripheral autonomic arousal. To date, little is known about the specific nature of evaluative processing during action monitoring and its interaction with autonomic arousal. This study aimed to replicate and extend previous findings on affective action evaluation and to examine trial-level associations between action evaluation and autonomic arousal. Thirty participants performed an affective priming paradigm, consisting of a go/no-go task with an embedded word categorization task, while skin conductance response (SCR) was recorded. After each motor response in the go/no-go task, participants categorized an affective word as positive or negative. Using mixed-effects modeling, we replicated previous evidence of action-based affective priming, in that false alarms in the go/no-go task were followed by faster and more accurate categorization of negative compared with positive words, whereas hits were followed by faster categorization of positive compared with negative words. We found no evidence for a trial-level association between this priming effect and SCR. Instead, errors increased SCR and its magnitude predicted post-error slowing (PES) on a trial-by-trial level, in line with an orienting account of PES. Our findings support the notion that valence values are assigned to own performed actions, with incorrect actions being evaluated as negative events and correct actions as positive events. Our results further suggest that this valence evaluation might operate independently of arousal-related processes during action monitoring, indicating that these processes might serve different roles in promoting adaptive behavior.

No abstract

Even though overactive error monitoring, indexed by enhanced amplitudes of the error-related negativity (ERN), is a potential biomarker for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the mechanisms underlying clinical variations in ERN amplitude remain unknown. To investigate whether ERN enhancement in OCD results from altered error evaluation, we examined the trial-wise valence evaluation of errors and its relation to the ERN in 28 patients with OCD and 28 healthy individuals. Electroencephalogram was recorded during an affective priming paradigm in which responses in a go/no-go task were followed by valence-based word categorization. Results indicated that errors were followed by faster categorization of negative than positive words, confirming that negative valence is assigned to errors. This affective priming effect was reduced in patients with OCD, while go/no-go performance was comparable between groups. Notably, this reduction amplified with increasing symptom severity. These results suggest attenuated affective error evaluation in OCD, possibly resulting from interfering effects of anxiety. There was no evidence for a trial-level association between valence evaluation and ERN, implying that ERN amplitude does not reflect valence assignment to errors. Consequently, altered error monitoring in OCD may involve alterations in possibly distinct processes, with weaker assignment of negative valence to errors being one of these.