Individual differences in social anxiety affect the salience of errors in social contexts

The error-related negativity (ERN) is an event-related potential that occurs approximately 50 ms after an erroneous response. The magnitude of the ERN is influenced by contextual factors, such as when errors are made during social evaluation. The ERN is also influenced by individual differences in anxiety, and it is elevated among anxious individuals. However, little research has examined how individual differences in anxiety interact with contextual factors to impact the ERN. Social anxiety involves fear and apprehension of social evaluation. In the present study, we explored how individual differences in social anxiety interact with social contexts to modulate the ERN. The ERN was measured in 43 young adults characterized as being either high or low in social anxiety, while they completed a flanker task in two contexts: alone and during social evaluation. The results revealed a significant interaction between social anxiety and context, such that the ERN was enhanced in a social relative to a nonsocial context only among highly socially anxious individuals. Furthermore, the degree of such enhancement significantly correlated with individual differences in social anxiety. These findings demonstrate that social anxiety is characterized by enhanced neural activity to errors in social-evaluative contexts.