Spouse Support and Stress: Gender Differences in Neural Measures of Performance Monitoring Under Observation of a Spouse

Abstract

Spousal support can mitigate stress’s impact on daily functioning and neural responses to stressors. However, the effectiveness of spousal support in reducing stress may be moderated by gender. The present study investigated the impact of observer presence in 66 heterosexual married couples, specifically a spouse or a confederate, on two neural indices of performance monitoring: early error detection (error-related negativity [ERN]) and later error awareness (error positivity [Pe]). Contrary to predictions, ERN was consistently smaller in observed conditions, suggesting that being observed, irrespective of the observer’s identity, diminished attention to errors. Notably, only women exhibited an enhanced ERN in the presence of their spouse, suggesting gender-specific differences in neural responses to spousal support during performance monitoring. Pe was larger when completing the task in the presence of a spouse and men displayed larger Pe than women. The present findings underscore the complex role of social context in performance monitoring, challenging existing assumptions about the uniformity of neural indices of performance monitoring during observation. Findings emphasize the need to dissect the nuanced interplay between observer presence, gender differences, and performance monitoring and offer valuable insights into the social modulation of error processing, particularly in a stressful observation context.

Stability of Performance Monitoring with Prolonged Task Performance: A Study of Error-Related Negativity and Error Positivity

“…Multilevel models are effective for investigating how ERN amplitude changes with prolonged task performance (Volpert-Esmond et al, 2021). Unlike traditional location-only multilevel models, multilevel location-scale models estimate the impact of predictors on both average scores (i.e., location) and within-person variance (i.e., scale; Walters et al, 2018;Williams et al, 2019;Williams et al, 2021), and these models have been successfully applied to studies of ERN (Clayson et al, 2021c;Clayson et al, in press-a;Clayson et al, 2022;Clayson et al, in press-b;Clayson et al, 2024b;Park et al, 2024) and other ERPs (Clayson et al, 2024a). Therefore, these multilevel location-scale models facilitate the examination of whether prolonged task performance leads to within-person changes in average scores, variability of scores, or both.…”