Individuals with high levels of anxiety show preferential processing of threatening information, and this cognitive bias is thought to be an integral component of anxiety disorders. In threat classification tasks, this bias manifests as high-anxiety participants being more likely to classify stimuli as threatening than their low-anxiety counterparts. However, it is unclear which cognitive mechanisms drive this bias in threat classification. To better understand this phenomenon, threat classification data were analyzed with 2 decision models: a signal detection model and a drift-diffusion model. Signal detection models can dissociate measures of discriminability and bias, and diffusion models can further dissociate bias due to response preparation from bias due to stimulus evaluation. Individuals in the study completed a trait anxiety measure and classified threatening and neutral words based on whether they deemed them threatening. Signal detection analysis showed that high-anxiety participants had a bias driven by a weaker threat criterion than low-anxiety participants, but no differences in discriminability. Drift-diffusion analysis further decomposed the threat bias to show that it is driven by both an expectation bias that the threat response was more likely to be correct, and a stimulus bias driven by a weaker criterion for evaluating the stimuli under consideration. These model-based analyses provide valuable insight and show that multiple cognitive mechanisms underlie differential threat processing in anxiety. Implications for theories of anxiety are discussed.
Research supporting cognitive reserve theory suggests that engaging in a variety of cognitive, social, and physical activities may serve as protective factors against age-related changes in mental functioning, especially if the activities are cognitively engaging. Individuals who participate in a variety of cognitive activities have been found to be more likely to maintain a higher level of cognitive functioning and be less likely to develop dementia. In this study, we explore the relationship between engaging in a variety of activities and cognitive performance amongst 206 healthy older adults between the ages of 65–85. Age and years of education were found to be the most significant predictors of a global composite representing cognitive performance, consistent with previous work linking these variables to age-related changes in cognition and the cognitive reserve. We interpret these results to suggest that age and education are better predictors of global cognitive performance in older adults than self-reported activity engagement.
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