Biological Psychology

BackgroundEmotion regulation--the ability to respond to and restore equilibrium after emotional perturbations--is central to mental health. Yet objective measurement remains limited to lab-based studies with group-level results, while consumer wearables focus on physical activity-related metrics rather than emotional dynamics. ObjectiveWe aimed to develop computational models that extract personalized, interpretable emotion regulation parameters from continuous heart rate variability (HRV) data collected via consumer wearables during everyday life, and validate these parameters against self-reported anxiety symptoms. MethodsWe analyzed 4 weeks of continuous HRV data from N = 49 healthy adults wearing Samsung Galaxy Active 2 smartwatches. We derived a continuous autonomic balance signal and developed three computational modeling approaches of increasing sophistication: (1) a static sympathetic load metric, (2) an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) dynamical systems model capturing continuous restoration dynamics, and (3) a discrete-state Markov transition model--the React & Rebound model-- capturing reactivity and rebound dynamics. All models were estimated using joint hierarchical Bayesian models that simultaneously extract subject-specific parameters from HRV time series and estimate their association with Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale (GAD-7) scores. The validity of extracted parameters was evaluated against anxiety symptom severity. ResultsStatic sympathetic load correlated modestly with GAD-7 (r = 0.39, R2 = 0.16). The OU model captured 69% of variance (R2 = 0.69), and the React & Rebound model captured 60% (R2 = 0.60) with substantially fewer parameters. Both models revealed that anxiety symptom severity is associated with the interaction between activation and restoration parameters--not either alone. Fast rebound appeared protective even for highly reactive individuals, who scored comparably to low-reactivity groups when restoration was rapid (Cohens d = 1.17 between highest- and lowest-risk quadrants). In the OU model, the interaction effect was specific to GAD-7 scores versus PHQ-9 and ISI scores; in the React & Rebound model, the interaction was credible across all three symptom measures. Both models were unchanged after controlling for physical activity ({Delta}R2 < 0.002). ConclusionsComputational models can extract interpretable emotion regulation parameters from naturalistic wearable data. The React & Rebound model yields two personalized parameters--reactivity and rebound--that are strongly associated with anxiety symptoms and define meaningful autonomic profiles. These parameters bridge autonomic dynamics measurable via consumer devices to neural circuit models of emotion regulation, with implications for characterizing individual autonomic profiles via consumer wearables.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a pleasant tingling sensation felt across the scalp and neck, widely reported to reduce anxiety and improve sleep. The Proximity Prediction Hypothesis (PPH) is the first comprehensive predictive coding model explaining ASMRs underlying neural mechanism. PPH posits that near-field acoustic cues from common ASMR triggers (e.g., brushing sounds, whispered speech) engage the audio-tactile Peripersonal Space Network, generating a top-down prediction of gentle C-tactile (CT) touch on CT fibre-rich skin of the scalp and neck. This prediction suppresses locus coeruleus (LC) arousal and increases vagal output, offering a mechanistic explanation for the phenomenons therapeutic benefits. In a subjective-experience survey (N = 64), ASMR-labelled trials were rated significantly more pleasant but only slightly more arousing than controls. Pleasantness predicted both the presence and intensity of tingles, supporting PPHs core claim that hedonic value, rather than sympathetic activation, drives the graded somatosensory response. PPH situates ASMR within the Neurovisceral Integration framework, predicting measurable Central Nervous System-Autonomic Nervous System (CNS-ANS) markers (beta-band desynchronisation in the posterior insula and proportional increases in high-frequency heart rate variability with tingle intensity). It further predicts reduced LC activity during ASMR, stronger effects in individuals with high interoceptive prediction error (e.g., anxiety, autism), and attenuation of tingles when spatial proximity cues are removed. By integrating auditory proximity, CT-touch anticipation, and autonomic regulation into a single predictive-coding account, PPH provides a unified, testable framework for explaining ASMR, offering a blueprint for translating this sensory phenomenon into targeted, evidence-based interventions for anxiety and sleep disorders.

Moral judgments may be driven by both principled and opportunistic motivations. Being morally principled is to consistently adhere to a single set of rules about morality and justice. Opportunistic morality rather involves selectively enforcing rules when they are beneficial to ones interests. These two kinds of motivations sometimes pull in the same direction, other times not. Prior studies on moral motivations have mostly focused on principled morality. Opportunistic morality, along with its phenotypic and genetic correlates, remains largely unexamined. Here, utilizing a sample from the Norwegian Twin Registry, consisting of 312 monozygotic-and 298 dizygotic twin pairs (N = 1220), we measure peoples propensity to react to injustice as victims, observers, beneficiaries, and perpetrators of injustice, using the Justice Sensitivity scale. Our genetically informative sample allows a biometric modeling approach that provides increased stringency in inferring latent psychological traits. We find evidence for two substantially heritable traits explaining correlations between Justice Sensitivity facets, which we interpret as a principled justice sensitivity (h2 = .45) leading to increased sensitivity to injustices of all categories, and an opportunistic justice sensitivity (h2 = .69) associated with increased victim sensitivity and a decreased propensity to feel guilt from being a perpetrator. These heritable justice traits share a genetic substrate with broad strategies for cooperation (as measured by altruism and trust) and for selectively benefitting oneself over the adaptive interests of others (as measured by social dominance orientation and support for monopolizing territory and resources), and differ genetically and phenotypically from Big Five personality traits.

Learning in adulthood is embedded in everyday social life, in which periods of psychosocial stress alternate with recovery. The autonomic nervous system regulates how the body responds to environmental demands, yet individuals differ markedly in this regulation. It remains unknown whether such individual differences in bodily regulation modulate the ability to learn probabilistic patterns from sensory input. Here, we investigated statistical learning of probabilistic patterns in speech streams in a six-hour experiment incorporating psychosocial stress and recovery to approximate everyday conditions. Sixty-five adults were exposed to novel speech streams in high- and low-stress contexts, with learning assessed immediately after exposure and following a rest period. Heart rate variability was recorded throughout the experiment to capture individual differences in autonomic reactivity to stress and recovery. From these measures, we constructed composite proxies of sympathetic (SNS) and parasympathetic (PNS) nervous system reactivity. Individuals with congruent SNS-PNS reactivity--either jointly high or jointly low--showed superior statistical learning outcomes across stress contexts. SNS reactivity preferentially supported encoding, whereas PNS reactivity supported consolidation. Moreover, the effect of SNS activation during speech exposure on statistical learning depended on individuals SNS reactivity profiles. These findings demonstrate that individual differences in bodily regulation are tightly linked to the ability to learn statistical dependencies in stressful environments. Overall, the findings highlight the essential role of brain-body-environment interactions in statistical learning.

Impaired learning that both novel and previously dangerous stimuli are safe (safety and extinction learning, respectively) are long standing, robust, and heritable features of anxiety disorders, representing potential endophenotypes. The computational mechanisms underpinning them have demonstrated associations with anxiety severity in recent studies. We undertook a pre-registered replication in a tenfold larger independent sample of twins (n = 925). Extinction learning rates were associated with anxiety severity ({rho}replication = -0.14, BFr0 = 1189. 67) but safety learning rates were not. Conversely, although safety learning rates showed modest heritability (h2safety = 0.16), extinction learning rates were not heritable. Accordingly, we were unable to identify genetic overlap between anxiety and either learning rate. Although this suggests neither learning rate is an anxiety endophenotype, we confirmed a cognitive-behavioral mechanism underpinning a robust marker of anxiety severity. Furthermore, we demonstrated heritability of a computationally modelled learning parameter, a key step towards establishing its biological basis.

Although childhood trauma alters neurobiological systems supporting emotion regulation and autonomic function, mechanisms linking trauma to mental imagery deficits remain unexplored. Here we examined whether autonomic nervous system symptoms mediate trauma-imagery associations in a general population sample (n = 433). All trauma types showed associations with reduced imagery vividness (r = -.12 to -.23), with emotional neglect and emotional abuse demonstrating the strongest effects. Physical trauma types and emotional abuse correlated with increased autonomic symptoms (r = .35-.38). Parallel mediation analyses revealed that autonomic symptom burden (BPQ ANS subscale), but not anxiety, significantly mediated trauma-imagery relationships through opposing mechanisms. Physical trauma types and emotional abuse showed negative indirect effects through heightened autonomic reactivity, with complete mediation for emotional abuse and physical neglect. In contrast, emotional neglect showed a positive indirect effect through reduced autonomic reactivity (a pattern that emerged when controlling for other trauma types) alongside the strongest direct effect on imagery. These findings demonstrate that childhood trauma impacts mental imagery through distinct autonomic mechanisms--hyperreactive dysregulation for physical/emotional abuse versus hyporeactive blunting for emotional neglect--suggesting autonomic-targeted interventions should be tailored to trauma type.

BackgroundUncertainty is a potential driver of poor mental health outcomes, and uncertainty is mounting globally across many domains of daily life. However, it remains unclear how anxiety and depression symptoms emerge in response to uncertainty in these real-life contexts. Capitalising on the COVID-19 pandemic as a naturalistic experiment, we investigate how heightened real-world environmental uncertainty interacts with intolerance of uncertainty (IU) to drive mental health symptoms. MethodsWe collected self-reported data on symptoms of anxiety, depression and IU from 301 participants for two time points. We performed cross-sectional network analyses to identify influential contributors and established a cross-lagged panel network (CLPN) to investigate longitudinal effects. ResultsAnxiety, depression and IU symptoms were higher when real-world uncertainty was higher (t2) compared to when it was lower (t1). Network analyses revealed the same three symptom clusters at both timepoints, however worry became more central to the network at t2. In the CLPN, unlike anxiety and depression symptoms, IU symptoms had the highest autoregressive values, meaning IU at t2 was well predicted by IU at t1. The item "inhibition of behaviour due to doubt" positively predicted both anxiety and anhedonia. ConclusionsThis study highlights the relevance of worry during higher real-world uncertainty and the predictive value of predispositional IU. Our findings further suggest behavioural inhibition to be a potential target to alleviate internalising psychopathology. During ever-increasing fluctuations in global uncertainty, we provide novel insights into the temporal relationships of highly prevalent psychopathology, which might inform support strategies for people with existing mental health vulnerabilities.

Creative performance fluctuates from moment to moment, suggesting that it depends partly on transient internal states present before creative thinking begins. Although such fluctuations have been identified in central neural activity, it remains unclear whether they are also reflected in autonomic physiology. We examined whether cardiac and electrodermal activity during a brief pre-trial resting period was associated with subsequent creative performance. Photoplethysmography, electrocardiography, and electrodermal activity were recorded while 28 participants completed the Alternative Uses Test and Fusion Innovation Test, assessing divergent and convergent creative thinking, respectively. Data from 27 participants was included in the analyses. Heart rate, heart rate variability, tonic skin conductance level, and phasic skin conductance activity were extracted from observation windows ranging from 11 to 30 s within a 30-s pre-trial rest period. Trial-level creativity was evaluated using GPT-based ratings of novelty, feasibility, and goal attainment. Linear mixed-effects models showed that higher pre-trial tonic skin conductance level was consistently associated with better subsequent creative performance across tasks, with overall model fit peaking at a 21-s observation window. Permutation-based feature-importance analysis provided convergent support for the contribution of tonic skin conductance, whereas the cardiac and phasic electrodermal indicators showed no reliable independent associations. However, the model explained only a small proportion of behavioral variance. These findings suggest that tonic sympathetic arousal reflects a momentary physiological state associated with creativity potential, while autonomic signals alone remain insufficient for accurate individual-level prediction.

Genetic associations with biopsychosocial phenotypes are often interpreted as evidence that the genome codes for fixed end-states. Instead, a given genotype might regulate a dynamic range of phenotypes in response to environmental change. We collected hair cortisol (n = 1,104), salivary cortisol in reaction to an in-laboratory stressor (n = 537), and diurnal salivary cortisol (n = 488) from twins aged 8-15 years in the Texas Twin Project. Baseline genetic variation in both salivary and hair cortisol was not simply magnified after stressor exposure or after waking. Rather, novel genetic influences on cortisol arose over time. Thus, environmental change can reveal genetic variation that would not otherwise be observed in static cortisol levels. These findings are in line with the notion that the genome regulates individuals reactions to the environment that differ across environments.

Wellbeing is commonly defined as the combination of feeling good and functioning well and typically conceptualized as two related but distinct components. Hedonic wellbeing emphasizes pleasure, happiness, and life satisfaction, while eudaimonic wellbeing focuses on meaning, personal growth, flourishing, and the realization of ones potential. The Mental Health Continuum-Short Form was developed as a comprehensive measure of wellbeing and includes three subscales assessing emotional, social, and psychological wellbeing. Although the Mental Health Continuum total score is often interpreted as an indicator of overall wellbeing, the underlying genetic structure of its three subscales and its genetic overlap with other commonly used wellbeing measures remains unclear. Using data from 5,212 individuals from the Netherlands Twin Register (72% female, mean age 36.4), we fitted multivariate twin models to examine the genetic architecture of the Mental Health Continuum and its associations with other wellbeing measures (quality of life, life satisfaction, subjective happiness, and flourishing). Results indicate that, at the genetic level, the Mental Health Continuum is best explained by its three distinct subscales rather than by a latent factor. When considering the Mental Health Continuum together with the other wellbeing measures, we found moderate to high genetic correlations (r = 0.52 - 0.83), indicating substantial overlap in the genetics underlying the wellbeing constructs. However, we did not find evidence for a single common genetic factor underlying all constructs. These findings highlight the multidimensional structure of wellbeing, but the moderate to high genetic correlations across measures suggest that it is important to align the level of measurement (phenotypic vs genetic) with the research question.

Early life adversity is associated with increased risk for psychopathology and shifts in life history (LH) strategies, but the psychological mechanisms underlying these associations remain unclear. Drawing on evolutionary-developmental theory, we examined whether short-term mindsets mediate associations between dimensions of childhood adversity and mental health and LH-related outcomes. In a UK-representative sample of 877 adults, we assessed threat, deprivation, and unpredictability, alongside internalizing and externalizing symptoms, borderline features, and a latent factor capturing reproductive versus somatic maintenance effort. Structural equation models showed that adversity predicted poorer mental health and faster LH strategies. Short-term mindsets, indexed by lower future orientation and higher affective impulsivity, mediated effects of adversity, particularly unpredictability. Further decomposition of unpredictability into short-timescale and long-timescale forms revealed dissociable effects, with short-timescale unpredictability primarily linked to psychopathology and long-timescale unpredictability to reproductive-oriented LH strategies.

The experience of pain, like other interoceptive processes, has recently been conceptualized in terms of predictive coding and free energy frameworks. In these views, the brain integrates sensory, proprioceptive, and interoceptive signals to generate probabilistic inferences about upcoming events, which shape both the state and the perception of our inner body. Here we ask whether it is possible to induce pain expectations by providing false faster (vs. slower) acoustic cardiac feedback before administering electrical cutaneous shocks. We test whether these expectations will shape both the perception of pain and the bodys physiological state toward prior predictions. Results confirmed that faster cardiac feedback elicited pain expectations that affected both perceptual pain judgments and the bodys physiological response. Perceptual pain judgments were biased towards the expected level of pain, such that participants illusorily perceived identical noxious stimuli as more intense and unpleasant. Physiological changes mirrored the predicted level of pain, such that participants actual cardiac response in anticipation of pain stimuli showed a deceleration in heart rate, in line with the well-known orienting cardiac response in anticipation of threatening stimuli (Experiment 1). In a control experiment, such perceptual and cardiac modulations were dramatically reduced when the feedback reproduced an exteroceptive, instead of interoceptive, cardiac feedback (Experiment 2). These findings show that cardiac perception can be understood as interoceptive inference that modulates both our perception and the physiological state of the body, thereby actively generating the interoceptive and autonomic consequences that have been predicted.

Our thoughts often drift away from the tasks at hand. Various factors influence this phenomenon, including changes in the external environment, individual cognitive characteristics, and fluctuations in bodily responses. This study investigated the relationship between autonomic nervous fluctuations and thought state transitions, focusing on individual differences such as cardiac interoception. First, the heartbeat counting task was conducted, and the difference between the reported and actual number of heartbeats was used as an index of interoceptive accuracy. The participants then completed an auditory attention task while their cardiac activities were monitored. During the task, thought probes were randomly presented, and participants selected their thought content from eight categories and rated aspects such as task concentration and arousal. We estimated trial-by-trial thought states in a data-driven manner and examined how the current thought state, autonomic nervous activity, and individual cardiac interoceptive accuracy influenced the thought state in the next trial. The results demonstrated a strong association between higher cardiac interoceptive accuracy and the maintenance of similar states in subsequent trials when accelerated heart rates occurred during self-related thought states. Furthermore, the participants with higher depressive tendencies and interoceptive accuracy exhibited an increased likelihood of transitioning to self-related states when experiencing decreased heart rate during task-concentrated states. These results suggest that accurately detecting heart rate changes associated with specific thought states facilitates updates in first-person conscious experience, thereby biasing the transition patterns of subsequent thought states. This study provides new insights into the cognitive and physiological mechanisms underlying the dynamics of spontaneous thought.

A high proneness to experience shame and guilt has been associated with psychopathology. Despite their similarity, shame- and guilt-proneness have different psychological and neurobiological correlates. The present study aims to compare the physiological correlates between shame- and guilt-proneness. Resting heart rate variability (HRV), a peripheral biomarker of emotion dysregulation and psychopathology, was measured in a sample of 60 Chinese young adults with two sessions of electrocardiogram recording. Proneness to shame and guilt were measured by the Test of Self-Conscious Affect 3. Hierarchical linear modeling indicated that guilt-proneness was positively associated with HRV while shame-proneness was not. Our findings implied that shame- and guilt-proneness have different relations with HRV. The distinct physiological relations are discussed with respect to the adaptive/maladaptive nature of shame- and guilt-proneness.

ObjectiveEmotional states are expressed in body and mind through subjective experience of physiological changes. In previous work, subliminal priming of anger prior to lexical decisions increased systolic blood pressure (SBP). This increase predicted the slowing of response times (RT), suggesting that baroreflex-related autonomic changes and their interoceptive (feedback) representations, influence cognition. Alexithymia is a subclinical affective dysfunction characterized by difficulty in identifying emotions. Atypical autonomic and interoceptive profiles are observed in alexithymia. Therefore, we sought to identify mechanisms through which SBP fluctuations during emotional processing might influence decision-making, including whether alexithymia contributes to this relationship. MethodsThirty-two male participants performed an affect priming paradigm and completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale. Emotional faces were briefly presented (20ms) prior a short-term memory task. RT, accuracy and SBP were recorded on a trial-by-trial basis. Generalized mixed-effects linear models were used to evaluate the impact of emotion, physiological changes, alexithymia score, and their interactions, on performances. ResultsA main effect of emotion was observed on accuracy. Participants were more accurate on trials with anger primes, compared to neutral priming. Greater accuracy was related to increased SBP. An interaction between SBP and emotion was observed on RT: Increased SBP was associated with RT prolongation in the anger priming condition, yet this relationship was absent under the sadness priming. Alexithymia did not significantly moderate the above relationships. ConclusionsOur data suggest that peripheral autonomic responses during affective challenges guide cognitive processes. We discuss our findings in the theoretical framework proposed by Lacey and Lacey (1970).

Hypomanic tendencies are associated with elevated goal-directed behavior, creativity, charisma, sociability, and entrepreneurial drive, but also with mood instability, irritability, impulsive persistence, and elevated risk for bipolar disorder and other psychopathology. Existing models often emphasize unidimensional constructs such as reward sensitivity or behavioral activation, yet these approaches incompletely capture the dynamic and often contradictory nature of the hypomanic temperament. We propose the Limbic Overload Hypothesis of Hypomanic Vulnerability, a dynamic biosocial framework suggesting that hypomanic tendencies reflect a persistent pattern of elevated engagement despite potential loss, coupled with reduced integration of negative emotional experience into subsequent behavioral regulation. Over time, this pattern may contribute to progressive "limbic overload," characterized by increasing emotional dysregulation, hypersensitivity to salient experiences, and vulnerability to psychopathology. Integrating evidence from personality research, affective neuroscience, and preliminary neuroimaging findings, we propose a dynamic cortico-limbic model linking prefrontal-limbic coordination, loss tolerance, emotional updating, and social reinforcement cycles. Preliminary pilot data suggest that individual differences in hypomanic tendencies are reflected not simply in baseline cortico-limbic organization, but in dynamic neural reconfiguration across pre-task resting-state [-&gt;] task [-&gt;] post-task resting-state transitions during loss-related decision making. Specifically, elevated hypomanic tendencies were associated with persistently elevated tolerance of potential losses and reduced integration of negative emotional information into subsequent behavioral regulation. We further propose that social connectedness and cognitive-emotional integration may mitigate progressive limbic overload and contribute to resilience. Together, this framework generates experimentally testable predictions regarding the neural, behavioral, and social processes underlying hypomanic vulnerability and resilience.

Cortisol, our stress hormone, exerts widespread influence on neural activity. However, its influence on the aperiodic component of the electroencephalography power spectrum remains to be investigated. Given individual differences in the capacity to cope with stress and adversity, it also remains unclear whether trait resilience moderates this relationship. Hence, the present study examined whether individual differences in trait resilience moderates the association between resting cortisol and aperiodic activity. Participants (N=145) completed various self-report questionnaires (e.g., trait resilience). Electroencephalography was recorded over a 20-minute baseline period, followed by salivary cortisol collection. The results revealed a significant moderating effect of trait resilience in the occipital scalp region. Specifically, higher cortisol concentration was associated with flatter 1/f slopes amongst individuals with low trait resilience, whereas this association was reversed amongst those with high trait resilience. Overall, our findings highlight the role of individual differences in trait resilience in shaping hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis-related neural dynamics.

Social decision-making relies on dynamic affect-cognition interactions across distributed brain networks, yet how incidental positive affect modulates these mechanisms at a millisecond timescale remains unclear. This study investigated the impact of music-induced positive emotion on the neural dynamics of decision-making in the Ultimatum Game. Fifty-six participants were assigned to either a happy music group or an active control (rain sound) group. Fifty-six participants were assigned to either a happy music group or an active control (rain sound) group, while electroencephalography was recorded to capture rapid neural dynamics. Behaviorally, happy music accelerated reaction times (RTs) and decoupled the ERP-RT correlations observed in the control condition. Neurally, positive affect amplified event-related potential amplitudes during early conflict detection (220-280 ms) and late valuation (520-560 ms) stages. Multivariate pattern analysis further revealed that happy music enhanced the neural separability and temporal stability of decision states (accept vs. reject). Moreover, using support vector regression based on functional network features, we found that decision acceptance rates were predicted with significantly higher accuracy in the happy music group (R = 0.60) compared to controls (R = 0.41). Crucially, feature weight analysis indicated a topological shift in decision strategy: while the control group relied on frontal-central edges (implicating executive control), the happy music group was characterized by central-temporal connections (suggesting integrative processing). Collectively, these findings provide novel evidence that incidental emotion intervenes at the millisecond timescale to bias social choices, offering a dynamic network-based account of the affect-cognition interaction.

Interoception includes signals originating both from inside the body and from its surface, the skin. Here, we focused on the perception of temperature, a crucial modality for the maintenance of homeostasis. We used a classic (static) thermal detection task and developed a new dynamic thermal matching task, in which participants have to match a previously perceived moving thermal stimulus on the skin to a range of colder or warmer stimuli, presented in increasing or decreasing order. We investigated both hairy (forearm) and non-hairy (palm) skin, in keeping with previous tactile studies targeting the potential involvement of C-tactile fibres, which are part of an afferent homeostatic system found mainly on hairy skin. We also aimed at investigating the relationship between performance on the two thermal tasks and on three other tasks in different interoceptive sub-modalities: cardiac perception, affective touch, and pain detection. We found a significantly more accurate perception of dynamic temperature on hairy compared to non-hairy skin overall, particularly when the temperature was decreasing. Static perception of cooling was also superior on hairy skin and was related to dynamic temperature and pain only on non-hairy skin. Thus, our results suggest that hairy skin may have higher thermosensitivity than non-hairy skin and that dynamic thermosensation might offer a promising avenue to investigate thermosensation as a skin-based interoceptive submodality. Critically, we did not find any other significant relationship in performance among the four interoceptive modalities examined, which indicates independent processing and that interoception might be best quantified using a battery of tests.

Anxiety significantly impacts reciprocal behavior, crucial for positive social interactions. The neurocomputational mechanisms of anxietys effects on the core (individual propensity) and peripheral (decision context) factors shaping reciprocity remain unclear. Here, we investigated reciprocity in individuals with low and high trait anxiety using a binary trust game with gain/loss framing, combining computational modeling, eye-tracking, and event-related potentials (ERPs). Our computational model, validated by eye-tracking data, identified four psychological components driving reciprocal behavior: reward, guilt aversion, superiority aversion, and superiority attraction. Regarding the core of reciprocity, trait anxiety diminished both overall reciprocity and specific psychological components like guilt aversion and superiority attraction, irrespective of context. The reduction in guilt aversion was supported by ERP findings showing decreased P2 (selective attention) and increased LPP (emotion regulation) amplitudes in anxious individuals. Regarding the periphery of reciprocity, trait anxiety altered the contextual perception of both superiority aversion and reward. Further, trait anxiety reversed the perception of superiority aversion from gain to loss contexts, a pattern that was linked to the N2 amplitudes (cognitive control). Our findings revealed distinct effects of trait anxiety on core and peripheral factors in reciprocity, offering potential targets for interventions aimed at improving reciprocity in individuals with anxiety disorders.