Expectancy bias in anxious samples.

Abstract

While it is well documented that anxious individuals have negative expectations about the future, it is unclear what cognitive processes give rise to this expectancy bias. Two studies are reported that use the Expectancy Task, which is designed to assess expectancy bias and illuminate its basis. This task presents individuals with valenced scenarios (Positive Valence, Negative Valence, or Conflicting Valence), and then evaluates their tendency to expect subsequent future positive relative to negative events. The Expectancy Task was used with low and high trait anxious (Study 1: N = 32) and anxiety sensitive (Study 2: N = 138) individuals. Results suggest that in the context of physical concerns, both high anxious samples display a less positive expectancy bias. In the context of social concerns, high trait anxious individuals display a negative expectancy bias only when negatively valenced information was previously presented. Overall, this suggests that anxious individuals display a less positive expectancy bias, and that the processes that give rise to this bias may vary by type of situation (e.g., social or physical) or anxiety difficulty.

Expectancy bias mediates the link between social anxiety and memory bias for social evaluation

“…In Aim 1 we assessed whether individuals with higher levels of SA had more negative expectations about evaluation in a peer evaluative context. Consistent with prior studies of SA (Cabeleira et al, 2014; Miles et al, 2004) and with our hypothesis, more negative expected evaluations were related to higher levels of SA. As the intercept for expectancy bias was at the neutral point, we interpret our findings as evidence of an increasing negativity bias, distinct from a decreasing positivity bias (Hirsch & Clark, 2004).…”

“…For Aim 1 we tested whether SA was associated with expectancy bias for social evaluation. Consistent with prior findings showing negative expectancy biases in individuals with higher levels of SA (e.g., Cabeleira et al, 2014; MacLeod & Byrne, 1996), we hypothesized that SA and expected evaluation would be negatively associated, whereby higher SA would predict more negative expectations about evaluation. For Aim 2 we examined whether expectations about social evaluation mediated the link between SA and response bias.…”

“…SA is associated with negative expectancy biases, whereby anxious individuals are more likely to have negatively distorted expectations of future social events than non-anxious individuals (e.g., Miles, MacLeod, & Pote, 2004). As such, a negative expectancy bias reflects a tendency for anxious individuals to expect a greater likelihood of negative versus positive events (Cabeleira et al, 2014; MacLeod & Byrne, 1996). Indeed, an individual who sees oneself as someone who is likely to be negatively evaluated may attend to, encode, and remember social experiences in ways consistent with this expectation.…”

Cognitive mechanisms of disgust in the development and maintenance of psychopathology: A qualitative review and synthesis

“…Expectancy bias can be assessed by asking participants to rate the likelihood that a given outcome will occur after viewing a given stimulus ( a priori ), or by asking participants to report how often two types of stimuli co-occurred during the course of the experiment ( a posteriori ; Davey & Dixon, 1996). In anxious samples, two kinds of expectancy bias have been found: expecting positive outcomes to occur less frequently and expecting negative outcomes to occur more frequently (Cabeleira et al, 2014; Chan & Lovibond, 1996). Expectancy bias is sometimes referred to as covariation bias, as anxious individuals demonstrate a tendency to form illusory correlations between randomly presented stimuli (Tomarken, Mineka, & Cook, 1989).…”

Reward and Punishment Sensitivity in Borderline and Avoidant Personality Disorders

“…On the Iowa Gambling task, trait anxiety is associated with a deficit in risk-taking behavior, such that highly anxious individuals avoid choices that are likely to be rewarded, in order to avoid the additional anxiety associated with the potential for punishment (Miu, Heilman, & Houser, 2008). In fact, because highly anxious individuals are characteristically biased to expect negative outcomes (Cabeleira et al, 2014), they exhibit risk aversion even when the probability of punishment is objectively low (Charpentier, Aylward, Roiser, & Robinson, 2017;Giorgetta et al, 2012, Raghunathan & Pham, 1999. During a probabilistic learning task (Jiang et al, 2018), individuals with high trait anxiety learned the stimulusreward contingencies slower than individuals with low trait anxiety, because after receiving some initial negative feedback they stopped allocating sufficient attention to feedback to effectively learn from it.…”