Common And Distinct Information Processing Biases In Social Anxiety And Depression As Revealed By Event Related Brain Potentials

The study of common and distinct information processing biases in anxiety and depression is of great importance to understanding the development, maintenance, and treatment of negative affective psychopathology. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were utilized to examine the relationship between attention and interpretation biases and dimensions of social anxiety and depression. Generally consistent with a vigilance-avoidance hypothesis, social anxiety was associated with early enhancements of attention to emotional significance followed by reduced threat processing reflected in the stimulus-locked frontal N1 and N2 and centro-parietal early P3, respectively. Depression, on the other hand, was associated with enhancement of later response-related control processes reflected in the response-locked error-related negativity. Social anxiety and depression showed a common negative interpretation bias as indexed by the stimulus-locked N4 expectancy violation effect. Implications of these findings for research and theory of information processing biases in social anxiety, depression and negative affective psychopathology more generally are considered.