Cognitive Failures, Affect, and Psychopathological Traits

Cognitive failures are errors in attention, memory, and action, that are commonplace in everyday life (e.g., forgetting why you went from one room to another). However, there are substantial individual differences in the frequency with which people experience cognitive failures. Previous research shows that people who report experiencing cognitive failures more frequently in everyday life also report higher levels of negative affective experiences, such as anxiety. Negative affect can be conceptualised within two distinct major theoretical frameworks: (1) negative versus positive affect, and (2) internalising versus externalising psychopathological traits. Here the goal is to elucidate the relationship between cognitive failures and the different components of these frameworks. Specifically, while there is a strong link between individuals’ cognitive failures and trait negative affective experiences, it remains unknown how cognitive failures relate to trait positive affective experiences – are these also linked? That is, might frequent experiences of any strong emotion tend to be associated with increased cognitive failures, or is the association with cognitive failures selective to negative affective experiences, such that the failures may be a product of processes such as rumination? Second, a major framework of psychopathological traits distinguishes between internalising (e.g., depression, anxiety) and externalising tendencies (e.g., impulsivity, antisociality). In separate studies, cognitive failures have been found to be associated with both internalising and externalising trait tendencies, but the extent to which each explains unique variance in cognitive failures is unknown, and this will be tested here by measuring them in the same participants.