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The error-related negativity (ERN) is a neural measure of error processing that has been implicated as a neurobehavioral trait and has transdiagnostic links with psychopathology. Few studies, however, have contextualized this traitlike component with regard to dimensions of personality that, as intermediate constructs, may aid in contextualizing links with psychopathology. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to examine the interrelationships between error monitoring and dimensions of personality within a large adult sample (N = 208). Building on previous research, we found that the ERN relates to a combination of negative affect, impulsivity, and conscientiousness. At low levels of conscientiousness, negative urgency (i.e., impulsivity in the context of negative affect) predicted an increased ERN; at high levels of conscientiousness, the effect of negative urgency was not significant. This relationship was driven specifically by the conscientiousness facets of competence, order, and deliberation. Links between personality measures and error positivity amplitude were weaker and nonsignificant. Post-error slowing was also related to conscientiousness, as well as a different facet of impulsivity: lack of perseverance. These findings suggest that, in the general population, error processing is modulated by the joint combination of negative affect, impulsivity, and conscientiousness (i.e., the profile across traits), perhaps more so than any one dimension alone. This work may inform future research concerning aberrant error processing in clinical populations.

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The current research examined how individuals with depression process emotional, self‐relevant stimuli. Across two studies, individuals with depression and healthy controls read stimuli that varied in self‐relevance while EEG data were recorded. We examined the late positive potential (LPP), an ERP component that captures the dynamic allocation of attention to motivationally salient stimuli. In Study 1, participants read single words in a passive‐viewing task. Participants viewed negative, positive, or neutral words that were either normative or self‐generated. Exploratory analyses indicated that participants with depression exhibited affective modulation of the LPP for self‐generated stimuli only (both positive and negative) and not for normative stimuli; healthy controls exhibited similar affective modulation of the LPP for both self‐relevant and normative stimuli. In Study 2, using a separate sample and a different task, stimuli were provided within the context of sentence stems referring to the self or other people. Participants with depression were more likely to endorse negative self‐referent sentences and reject positive ones compared to healthy controls. Depressed participants also exhibited an increased LPP to negative stimuli compared to positive or neutral stimuli. Together, these two studies suggest that depression is characterized by relatively increased sensitivity to affective self‐relevant stimuli, perhaps in the context of a broader reduction in emotional reactivity to stimuli that are not self‐relevant. Thus, depression may be characterized by a more nuanced pattern based on the degree of stimulus self‐relevance than either a global decrease or increase in reactivity to affective stimuli.

Advances in technology have provided opportunities to assess physiological correlates and further our understanding of a number of constructs, including personality traits. Event-related potentials (ERPs), scalp-recorded measures of brain activity with millisecond temporal resolution, show properties that make them potential candidates for integrating neurophysiological methods into personality research. Several commonly used ERPs have trait-like properties including test-retest stability approaching .8 over two weeks. Additionally, ERP methods are relatively inexpensive and tolerable compared to other neurophysiological methods (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI]) making them easier to obtain sample sizes required for individual differences research. Finally, the tasks that elicit ERPs are flexible enough to allow researchers to customize the tasks to the psychological constructs of interest. These factors suggest that ERPs could potentially be useful in the study of personality and individual differences. A baseline approach to this line of inquiry is to examine the properties of ERPs as neurophysiological individual differences markers and probe their links to personality traits as assessed by self-report questionnaires. This article does this for three well-studied ERPs. Techniques commonly used in personality assessment research-but rarely in ERP research-were applied to these candidate ERPs to examine their psychometric properties and personality correlates. Overall, although ERPs show promising properties as neurophysiological indicators of individual differences, they were only marginally related with existing personality traits. Further research clarifying the ERPs measurement properties and potential links with known personality processes is needed. Finally, we list some strategies to further integrate these two areas of research. (PsycINFO Database Record

Mindfulness is an effective emotion regulation strategy, and its principles have formed the basis for several psychotherapies. Of interest is how a mindful perspective changes not only the subjective experience of emotion, but also neural activity involved in emotional processing. In a previous event-related potential (ERP) study, trait mindfulness was linked with reduced neural activity in response to affective stimuli, as measured by the late positive potential (LPP). Building on this result, we investigated how both state (i.e., task-induced) and trait mindfulness would jointly affect the LPP in a large adult sample (N = 118). First, participants passively viewed affective images while ERP data were recorded. Participants were then instructed to adopt a mindful perspective and viewed a second, equivalent set of images. We hypothesized that the LPP would be reduced from the passive viewing to the mindful viewing condition. Contrary to our hypothesis, task-induced mindfulness increased LPP amplitude relative to passive viewing across all image types, suggesting that state mindfulness increases motivated attention to stimuli, regardless of affective valence and arousal. Trait mindfulness did not correlate with LPP amplitude in either the passive or mindful viewing conditions. As an unexpected finding, gender moderated the association between trait mindfulness and LPP amplitude to emotional images during mindful viewing. We propose that state and trait mindfulness impact emotional processing through different neural mechanisms and discuss implications for mindfulness as an emotion regulation strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).