On the relationship between cognitive failures, affect, and psychopathological traits

Cognitive failures are absent-minded mistakes in attention, memory, and action, such as forgetting to take your keys with you when you leave the house. There are substantial individual differences in the frequency with which people experience cognitive failures in everyday life, and previous research has shown that these individual differences are strongly associated with negative affect (e.g., trait anxiety). Negative affect can be conceptualized within two major different frameworks: (1) positive versus negative affect, and (2) internalizing versus externalizing psychopathological traits. The goal of this research was to elucidate the relationship between cognitive failures and the components of these frameworks. N = 290 adults completed measures of these constructs and the associations between them was assessed in a cross-sectional study. Results showed that cognitive failures were positively correlated with negative affect and negatively correlated with positive affect. However, cognitive failures were uniquely associated with negative not positive affect. In addition, cognitive failures were uniquely associated with both an internalizing (trait anxiety) and an externalizing (antisociality) psychopathological trait, suggesting that cognitive failures are elevated across multiple psychopathological traits. Together these psychopathological traits explained over 40% of the variance in cognitive failures, highlighting how strongly psychopathological traits and cognitive failures are intertwined.