Recent evidence indicates that measures of brain functioning as indexed by event-related potentials (ERP) on the electroencephalogram aligns more closely to transdiagnostic measures of psychopathology than to categorical taxonomies. The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) is a transdiagnostic, dimensional framework aiming to solve issues of comorbidity, symptom heterogeneity and arbitrary diagnostic boundaries. Based on shared features, the emotional disorders are allocated into subfactors Distress and Fear. Evidence indicate that disorders which are close in the HiTOP hierarchy share etiology, symptom profiles and treatment outcome. However, further studies testing the biological underpinnings of the HiTOP are called for. In this study, we assessed differences between Distress and Fear in a range of well-studied ERP components. Fifty-one patients with emotional disorders were divided into two groups (Distress, N = 26; Fear, N = 25) according to HiTOP criteria and compared against 37 healthy comparison subjects (HC). Addressing issues in traditional ERP preprocessing and analysis methods, we applied robust single-trial analysis as implemented in the EEGLAB toolbox LIMO EEG. Several ERP components were found to differ between the groups. Surprisingly, we found no difference between Fear and HC for any of the ERPs. This suggests that some well-established results from the literature, e.g., increased error-related negativity in OCD, is not a shared neurobiological correlate of the Fear subfactor. Conversely, for Distress, we found reductions compared to Fear and HC in several ERP components across paradigms. Future studies could utilize HiTOP-validated psychopathology measures to more precisely define subfactor groups.