The Role of Mindfulness and Emotional Stability in Error Detection

Previous studies showed that mindfulness training and emotional stability had an impact on neural correlates of error processing. However, the impact of both trait mindfulness and emotional stability on error detection processes were not simultaneously investigated, although one could assume that there are interacting effects of the traits. We examined the individual variations of a component of the event-related potential (ERP), the error negativity (Ne/ERN), and behavioral data related to the two traits in a modified Simon task combined with an error detection task. Accounting for the positive relationship of mindfulness and emotional stability, our analyses revealed two opposing effects: a significant difference between the Ne/ERN amplitudes from detected and undetected errors was found for highly mindful participants as well as for participants with low emotional stability. These results suggest that the early error process for highly mindful participants already includes a distinction between aware and unaware errors. Moreover, low emotionally stable participants also showed higher Ne/ERN amplitudes after their aware errors than after their unaware errors, while there was no differentiation in amplitude regarding error awareness for highly emotionally stable participants. Future research should take emotional stability into account when reporting on trait mindfulness, because of possible opposing effects on performance monitoring.