Towards an emotional stress test: a reliable, non-subjective cognitive measure of anxious responding

Abstract

Response to stress is a key factor in mood and anxiety disorder aetiology. Current measures of stress-response are limited because they largely rely on retrospective self-report.Objectively quantifying individual differences in stress response would be a valuable step towards improving our understanding of disorder vulnerability. Our goal is to develop a reliable, objective, within-subject probe of stress response. To this end, we examined stresspotentiated performance on an inhibitory control task from baseline to 2-4 weeks (n=50) and again after 5-9 months (n=22) as well as examining population measures for a larger sample (n=165). Replicating previous findings, threat of shock improved distractor accuracy and slowed target reaction time on this task. Critically, both within-subject self-report measures of stress (ICC=0.74) and stress-potentiated task performance (ICC=0.58) showed clinically useful test-retest reliability. Threat-potentiated task performance may therefore hold promise as a non-subjective measure of individual stress-reactivity.

The impact of threat of shock-induced anxiety on memory encoding and retrieval

“…This type of anxiety is adaptive because it primes defensive responses to promote harm avoidance (Robinson et al 2013b). Nevertheless this manipulation has reliable psychological, psychophysiological, and neural effects that mimic symptoms seen in anxiety disorders (Robinson et al 2012(Robinson et al , 2013b(Robinson et al , 2014Aylward and Robinson 2016). Moreover, this method presents a further methodological advantage with regard to the study of memory, as it allows anxiety to be independently manipulated at both memory encoding and retrieval.…”

Back-translating a rodent measure of negative bias into humans: the impact of induced anxiety and unmedicated mood and anxiety disorders

“…One explanation is that the absence of punishment rendered our task insensitive to transient anxiety. In participants with high trait anxiety scores, fearful, negative cues have an attentional bias over neutral or positive cues (36) and an operant judgement bias task with reward-reward outcomes gave rise 18 to a different profile of responding compared to a task with reward-punishment outcomes (16). Another explanation is that the non-significant effect in the asymptomatic group is a consequence of an insufficiently anxiogenic manipulation.…”

“…They performed the task under instructed threat and safe conditions in manner the same as (18). Each block (total=4) consisted of 60 randomly presented trials (20 low/mid-tone/high tones; total=240).…”

“…In this study, we explored the impact of two types of anxiety on a human version of this task: a) pathological anxiety in mood and anxiety disorders, and b) acute anxiety/stress induced using threat of unpredictable shock. The threat of shock stress induction is a wellvalidated and reliable technique which is also back-translated from animal models (17,18).…”

“…Critically, it can be used to explore the interaction between cognition and anxiety withinsubjects and has been shown to elicit 'adaptive anxiety' responses such as response inhibition and harm avoidance (18)(19)(20) as well as 'negative bias' (17,21,22) in healthy individuals.…”