Emotions and individual differences shape foraging under threat

Abstract

Animals and humans in natural environments balance their time between vigilance for threats and foraging for rewards. We designed a decision-making task to investigate how mood states and psychiatrically-relevant transdiagnostic dimensions affected this in a large online sample (discovery: N=374, replication: N=702). Mood was related to task environmental factors and stress showed homeostatic relationships with task behaviours such as foraging. Anxiety was associated with decreased vigilance due to threat-related worry, while compulsive checking was linked with increased but sub-optimal vigilance. Apathy was related to reduced vigilance and more frequent foraging, potentially reflecting reluctance to switch behaviours. Anhedonia was linked with a reduction in self-reported task engagement. Women reported higher stress and favoured vigilance over foraging. In sum, behavioural traits associated with psychological illness corresponded not simply to responsivity to threat but to specific, replicable patterns of balancing behaviour between foraging and vigilance for predatory threat.

An ancient subcortical circuit decides when to orient to threat in humans

“…The serotonergic system is also considered the first line pharmacological target in depression and anxiety [16][17][18][19] . As noted a previous study 1 demonstrated the task we use here is sensitive to individual variation in anxiety; for instance, higher scores on a clinical measure of compulsive checking were reliably associated with increased vigilance and more disorganized patterns of switching between foraging and checking in the current task.…”

“…3B and 7). Notably, individual variation in the balance between foraging and checking has been shown to be related to individual variation in clinical indices of compulsive behaviors, such as checking, in a large sample study 1 . The present results suggest that individual variation in DRN activity might be related to checking including when it becomes compulsive and problematic.…”

“…While progress has been made in understanding mechanisms underlying reward- and threat-guided behavior independently, how people and other animals spontaneously switch between the two behavioral modes is not well understood. In addition to the fundamental importance of such decisions, individual variation in how they are taken is related to individual variation in clinical anxiety scores such as compulsivity 1 . In the present experimental paradigm, participants freely managed their time and decided themselves when to switch between foraging for rewards versus checking for approaching predators.…”

“…They are central features of psychological illnesses including generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, panic, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Until recently 1 , the understanding of cognitive and neural mechanisms related to fear and anxiety has depended on experimental paradigms in which the impact of fear-inducing stimuli on behavior and neural activity can be investigated in the laboratory. Despite their elegance and continuing and critical importance 2 , such paradigms do not capture an important feature of fear-related behavior in the everyday lives of humans and other animals: the balancing of attention between threat and reward.…”

“…Here we focus on how people move between these two modes of behavior using a task known to reflect individual variation in core features of anxiety and depression in two large samples (discovery: N=374, replication: N=702 1 ). It has been argued that considering how animals have evolved to deal with environmental threats may provide insights into fear and anxiety mechanisms both in normal and poor mental health 3–6 and so our task adopts a similar approach here; we examine how human participants balance attention between reward- and threat-related stimuli focusing on moments of switching between the two behaviors – foraging for reward and checking for threats and the first occasion on which checking led to actual threat detection.…”