The Relationship between Neuropsychological Measures of Executive Functioning and Anxiety with Neurophysiological Markers of Cognitive and Affective Control

With cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) centrally positioned as the dominant model in the psychosocial treatment of mental disorders, research investigating biomarkers of dysfunctional cognitive processing may aid our understanding of the neurobiological basis of these disorders and assist in formulating integrated treatments. One event related potential theorized to function in the cognitive control of adaptive behavior, the feedback negativity (FN), shows differences in a variety of psychiatric samples. While the FN is thought to reflect anterior cingulate error monitoring, based on dopaminergic input from the mesolimbic reward pathways, numerous other variables are related to the FN. However, studies investigating the FN commonly utilize positive and negative feedback from gambling tasks, which have been shown to be inherently affected by fallacious reasoning and affective responses. Thus, the previously described differences in the FN could represent attempts to control affective responses and not solely a biomarker of cognitive dysfunction. A series of four studies were completed to investigate these questions of FN processing and affective responses to tasks. Initial factor analysis of personality and reward related behavior measures identified a tripartite division in higher order personality indicative of behavioral tendencies toward seeking rewards, behavioral suppression, or maintaining current behaviors. Secondly, creation and validation of a task design of gambling and pattern learning tasks with nearly identical reward feedback found differences in FN and heart rate variability (HRV) responses to the tasks, supporting greater affective responsivity to loss feedback during the gambling task. A larger scale follow-up study discovered that a number of neuropsychological and personality variables significantly predicted FN feedback processing in response to these tasks, generally supporting a bifurcation of attention engagement, with the pattern learning task being more highly related to neurocognitive functioning, while the gambling task was more closely related to affect regulation. Finally, a pilot study comparing normal controls and a Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) sample identified group differences in a behavioral bias to avoid the demonstrated greater affective response to the gambling task in the GAD group, generally supporting use of the FN as a biomarker of perceptual bias in clinical anxiety.

Department dc:contributor.department

Psychology: Clinical Psychology

Grantor dc:publisher

East Carolina University

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Highsmith, Jonathan M.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Everhart, D. Erik

• Clinical psychology
• Physiological psychology
• Electroencephalogram
• Electrophysiology
• Event related potential
• Heart rate variability
• Neuropsychology
• Personality

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10342/4505

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:thescholarship.ecu.edu:10342/4505