Enhanced error-related brain activations for mistakes that harm others: ERP evidence from a novel social performance-monitoring paradigm

Our mistakes often have negative consequences for ourselves, but may also harm the people around us. Continuous monitoring of our performance is therefore crucial for both our own and others' well-being. Here, we investigated how modulations in responsibility for other's harm affects electrophysiological correlates of performance-monitoring, viz. the error-related negativity (ERN) and error positivity (Pe). Healthy participants (N = 27) performed a novel social performance-monitoring paradigm in two responsibility contexts. Mistakes made in the harmful context resulted in a negative consequence for a co-actor, i.e., hearing a loud aversive sound, while errors in the non-harmful context were followed by a soft non-aversive sound. Although participants themselves did not receive auditory feedback in either context, they did experience harmful mistakes as more distressing and reported higher effort to perform well in the harmful context. ERN amplitudes were enhanced for harmful compared to non-harmful mistakes. Pe amplitudes were unaffected. The present study shows that performing in a potentially harmful social context amplifies early automatic performance-monitoring processes and increases the impact of the resulting harmful mistakes. These outcomes not only further our theoretical knowledge of social performance monitoring, but also demonstrate a novel and useful paradigm to investigate aberrant responsibility attitudes in various clinical populations.