Neuroscience is facing a replication crisis. Little effort is invested in replication projects and low power in many studies indicates a potentially poor state of research. To assess replicability of EEG research, the #EEGManyLabs project aims to reproduce the most influential original EEG studies. A spin-off to the main project shall investigate the relationship between frontal alpha asymmetries and psychopathological symptoms, the predictive qualities of which have lately been considered controversial. To ensure that preprocessing of EEG data can be conducted automatically (via Automagic), we tested 47 healthy participants in an EEG resting state paradigm and collected psychopathological measures. We analyzed reliability and quality of manual and automated preprocessing and performed multiple regressions to investigate the association of frontal alpha asymmetries and depression, worry, trait anxiety and COVID-19 related worry. We hypothesized comparably good interrater reliability of preprocessing methods and higher data quality in automatically preprocessed data. We expected associations of leftward frontal alpha asymmetries and higher depression and anxiety scores and significant associations of rightward frontal alpha asymmetries and higher worrying and COVID-19- related worrying. Interrater reliability of preprocessing methods was mostly good, automatically preprocessed data achieved higher quality scores than manually preprocessed data. We uncovered an association of relative rightward lateralization of alpha power at one electrode pair and depressive symptoms. No further associations of interest emerged. We conclude that Automagic is an appropriate tool for large-scale preprocessing. Findings regarding associations of frontal alpha asymmetries and psychopathology likely stem from sample limitations and shrinking effect sizes.
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