The effect of trait anxiety on the time course of self-relevant processing: Evidence from the perceptual matching task

Studies have widely reported that trait anxiety is associated with a range of cognitive biases toward external negative emotional stimuli. However, few studies have examined whether trait anxiety modulates intrinsic self-relevant processing. This study investigated the electrophysiological mechanism underlying trait anxiety's modulating effect on self-relevant processing. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed a perceptual matching task that assigned an arbitrary geometric shape to an association with a "self" or "non-self" label. Results showed larger N1 amplitudes under self-association than under friend-association conditions, and smaller P2 amplitudes for self- than for stranger-association conditions in individuals with high trait anxiety. However, these self-biases in the N1 and P2 stages were not observed in those with low trait anxiety until the later N2 stage, in which the self-association condition provoked smaller N2 amplitudes than the stranger-association condition. In addition, both high and low trait anxiety individuals showed larger P3 amplitudes for the self-association condition than for the friend- and stranger-association conditions. These findings suggest that, although both high and low trait anxiety individuals showed self-bias, high trait anxiety individuals distinguished between self-relevant and non-self-relevant stimuli at an earlier stage, which may reflect hypervigilance to self-relevant stimuli.