Abstract: New research reveals that anxiety and indifference lead to fundamentally different patterns in decision-making under uncertainty. Anxious individuals perceive their environment as highly unstable, leading them to explore more options, particularly after negative outcomes.
In contrast, indifferent individuals view results as random and reduce their willingness to explore new choices. These findings underscore the need for tailored treatment approaches that explain how patients perceive and handle uncertainty.
Important facts
Anxiety and decision-making: Anxious individuals recognize more volatility and explore more after failure. Postoperative and Exploration: Indifferent individuals consider the outcome random and reduce exploratory behavior. Clinical Implications: Findings should be tailored to the patient’s perception of uncertainty.
Source: University of Minnesota
Making decisions in uncertain circumstances is part of everyday life. A new study from the University of Minnesota School of Medicine reveals that anxiety and indifference (two common but distinct emotional states) lead to fundamentally different patterns of how people learn and decide to make decisions.
The findings have recently been published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.
This study investigated how anxiety and indifference, or lack of interest, influence people’s perceptions of uncertainty and subsequent decision-making behavior.
Using a combination of behavioral experiments and computational modeling, the researchers looked at how over 1,000 participants made their choices in a dynamic environment where they needed to repeatedly decide whether to explore new options or stick to familiar options.
“While anxiety and indifference often occur simultaneously in clinical conditions, our findings show that people handle uncertainty and lead to opposite patterns of how they make decisions.”
“This helps explain why these conditions require different treatment approaches.”
The key findings are as follows:
Anxious individuals perceive higher environment volatility and explore more options. Particularly, in the case of negative outcomes, patoms are considered more random and show a decrease in exploratory behavior, and the ratio of randomness and perceptual volatility mediates the relationship between anxiety and exploratory behavior.
“These emotional states affect both new experiences in the world and openness to perceptions of unpredictability,” said Dr. Xinyuan Yan, a postdoctoral researcher at U of M Medical School and a lead author of the study.
“For example, an uneasy person may view the job market as unpredictable and requires constant vigilance. Those experiencing indifference may use the same resume to see job hunting as random.
This study provides a new framework for understanding how emotional states affect decision-making and has important implications for treating neuropsychiatric symptoms. Findings suggest that treatment approaches may be more effective when patients are tailored to the way they perceive and handle uncertainty.
Funding: This study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (R21MH127607), the National Institute of Drug Abuse (K23DA050909), and the MNDRIVE initiative at the University of Minnesota.
About this mental health and decision-making research news
Author: Alexandra Smith
Source: University of Minnesota
Contact: Alexandra Smith – University of Minnesota
Image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Open access.
“The clear computational mechanism of uncertainty handling explains conflicting exploratory behaviors in anxiety and indifference,” Alexander Herman et al. Biological psychiatry: Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging
Abstract
Clear computational mechanisms for uncertainty handling explain conflicting exploratory behaviors in anxiety and indifference
background
Decision making in an uncertain environment can lead to a variety of outcomes, and how you handle those outcomes can depend on your emotional state. Understanding how individuals interpret the causes of uncertainty is important for understanding adaptive behavior and mental well-being. Uncertainty can be broadly classified into two components: volatile and probabilistic.
Volatility explains how quickly conditions change. On the other hand, probabilisticity refers to the randomness of the outcome. We investigated how anxiety and indifference influenced people’s perceptions of uncertainty and how perceptions of uncertainty explored.
method
Participants (n = 1001, nonclinical sample) completed the restless three-arm bandit task analyzed using both the potential state model and the process model.
result
Anxious individuals perceived uncertainty as a result of volatility, leading to improved exploration and learning rates, particularly after omission of rewards. Conversely, indifferent individuals viewed uncertainty as more probabilistic, resulting in lower exploration and learning rates.
Perceived volatility and stochastic ratios mediated anxiety and secondary outcomes. The reduced dimensions indicated that exploration and uncertainty estimates are clear but related latent factors that shape a diverse range of adaptive behaviors regulated by anxiety and indifference.
Conclusion
These findings reveal clear computational mechanisms of how anxiety and indifference influence decision-making and provide a framework for understanding cognitive and emotional processes in neuropsychiatric disorders.
