Reduced risk-taking behavior as a trait feature of anxiety.

Abstract

Affect can have a significant influence on decision-making processes and subsequent choice. One particularly relevant type of negative affect is anxiety, which serves to enhance responses to threatening stimuli or situations. In its exaggerated form, it can lead to psychiatric disorders, with detrimental consequences for quality of life, including the ability to make choices. This study investigated, for the first time, how pathological anxiety affects risk-taking behavior. In this study, 20 anxious participants meeting Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, criteria for either generalized anxiety disorder (n = 10) and for panic attack disorder (n = 10), as well as 20 matched nonanxious controls, performed a gambling task. To investigate the tendency toward either a risk-seeking or a risk-averse behavior, we employed a task that did not allow for learning from outcomes. Anxious participants made significantly fewer risky choices than matched nonanxious participants. Specifically, they become risk-avoidant after gains. Moreover, anxious participants not only were less happy after gains but were also less sad after losses, and they also evinced less desire to change their choices after losses than did nonanxious participants. Importantly, whereas the desire to switch choice was followed by actual choice switch for all participants, happiness directly predicted subsequent risky choices, particularly in the nonanxious participants. Further analyses revealed that the anxious participants' risk-avoidance behavior was independent of different types of anxiety disorder (panic attack disorder and generalized anxiety disorder) as well as of the effects of psychotropic drugs treatment. This study demonstrates a specific role for anxiety in individual decision making. In particular, hypersensitivity to potential threats and pessimistic evaluation of future events reduced risk-taking behavior.

Behavioral contagion during learning about another agent’s risk-preferences acts on the neural representation of decision-risk

“…Combining this view with our finding that risk-related caudate activity remains even after controlling for motor-related responses, we suggest that the caudate is involved in risk-processing during decisionmaking, above and beyond any contribution of this structure in motor responding per se. Moreover, a number of clinical studies have demonstrated that individuals with anxiety disorders show reduced reward-related neural responses in caudate (46), while being more risk-averse than other clinical patients and normal control groups (47,48). These findings broadly support our claims about a role for the caudate in risk representation and modulation of risk-preference.…”

Altered striatal intrinsic functional connectivity in pediatric anxiety

“…Lower connectivity of this striatal*SMA/BA6 link in anxiety might reflect a disturbance of the translation of motivational goals into action due to impaired flow of information to motor effectors. Highly speculative, it might be a reflection of a bias towards avoidance, a hallmark of anxiety (Aupperle and Paulus, 2010; Giorgetta et al, 2012; Levita, Hoskin, and Champi, 2012; Lorian and Grisham, 2010; Maner and Schmidt, 2006). …”

Trait Anxiety Moderates the Relationship Between Testosterone Responses to Competition and Aggressive Behavior

“…Research has also shown that low anxious people appraise stressful situations as a challenge whereas high anxious people appraise stressful situations as a threat (Jerusalema 1990). High anxiety also reduced risk -taking behaviors in a group of clinically anxious patients by increasing perceptions of potential threat, amplifying negative attitudes towards consequences, and promoting risk avoidance (Giorgetta et al 2012). In the present study, participants with low dispositional anxiety, coupled with the endocrine response of an increase in T, may assess their resources as surpassing the demands of the PSAP task and therefore view it as a challenge, eliciting a more competitive or aggressive behavioral response.…”