Don’t worry, it won’t be fine. Contributions of worry and anxious arousal to startle responses and event-related potentials in threat anticipation

A widely shared framework suggests that anxiety maps onto two dimensions: anxious apprehension and anxious arousal. Previous research linked individual differences in these dimensions to differential neural response patterns in neuropsychological, imaging, and physiological studies. Differential effects of the anxiety dimensions might contribute to inconsistencies in prior studies that examined neural processes underlying anxiety, such as hypersensitivity to unpredictable threat. We investigated the association between trait worry (as a key component of anxious apprehension), anxious arousal, and the neural processing of anticipated threat. From a large online community sample (N = 1,603), we invited 136 participants with converging and diverging worry and anxious arousal profiles into the laboratory. Participants underwent the NPU-threat test with alternating phases of unpredictable threat, predictable threat, and safety, while physiological responses (startle reflex and startle probe locked event-related potential components N1 and P3) were recorded. Worry was associated with increased startle responses to unpredictable threat and increased attentional allocation (P3) to startle probes in predictable threat anticipation. Anxious arousal was associated with increased startle and N1 in unpredictable threat anticipation. These results suggest that trait variations in the anxiety dimensions shape the dynamics of neural processing of threat. Specifically, trait worry seems to simultaneously increase automatic defensive preparation during unpredictable threat and increase attentional responding to threat-irrelevant stimuli during predictable threat anticipation. The current study highlights the utility of anxiety dimensions to understand how physiological responses during threat anticipation are altered in anxiety and supports that worry is associated with hypersensitivity to unpredictable, aversive contexts. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13415-023-01094-4.