De-identified behavioral and self-report data as well as analysis code have been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be assessed at https://osf.io/y6urc/?view_only=a9cf3daa9c1e4e69bdc79f6d00175fb8. The preregistration form for Experiment1 is available at https://aspredicted.org/BB2_1HT. Early versions of this work were presented at the 2021 Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion, 2021 virtual Society of Neuroeconomics conference, and seminars at Harvard University. We thank Dr. Thomas Rusch for his help with data analysis. We thank members of Phelps Lab and Gershman Lab for insightful discussions.

Exploration is at the core of many real-life decisions, helping people gain information about the environment and make better choices in the long run. Although anxiety has been related to decreased physical exploration and avoidance behavior, past findings on the interaction between anxiety and exploration during decision-making under uncertainty were inconclusive. The current study provides a holistic picture of the anxiety-exploration relationship by focusing on latent factors of trait anxiety and different exploration strategies when facing volatility-induced uncertainty. Across two well-powered online studies (N = 984), we demonstrated that people used a hybrid of directed, random, and undirected exploration strategies, which were respectively sensitive to relative uncertainty, total uncertainty, and value difference. The somatic factor of trait anxiety, the propensity to experience physical symptoms of anxiety, was inversely correlated with directed exploration and undirected exploration, manifesting as being less likely to choose the uncertain option and reducing choice stochasticity regardless of uncertainty. Trait somatic anxiety was also related to underestimation of relative uncertainty, which could potentially account for its negative impact on directed exploration. Together, these results reveal the selective role of trait somatic anxiety in modulating both uncertainty-driven and value-driven exploration strategies. More crucially, the differential effects of trait anxiety components underscore the importance of adopting a dimensional approach in future studies.

When recalling autobiographical events, people retrieve not only the event details, but also the feelings they experienced. Past work with different measures of memories for feelings remain inconclusive, suggesting that people are either highly consistent or inconsistent with remembering feelings. The current study examined whether people are able to consistently recall the intensity of previous feelings associated with consequential and negatively valenced emotional events, i.e., the 9/11 attack (N = 769) and Covid-19 pandemic (N = 726). By comparing the initial and recalled intensities of negative feelings, we found that people systematically recall more intense negative feelings than they initially reported – overestimating the intensity of past negative emotional experience. The Covid-19 dataset further showed that people whose emotional well-being improved more demonstrate smaller biases in remembered feelings. Across both datasets, the remembered intensity of feelings correlated with initial feelings and were also influenced by current feelings, although the impact of the current feelings was stronger in the Covid-19 dataset than the 9/11 dataset. Our results suggest that when recalling negative autobiographical events, people tend to overestimate the intensity of experienced negative emotional experience with the degree of bias influenced by current feelings and well-being.

Exploration is an important part of decision making and is crucial to maximizing long-term rewards. Past work has shown that people use different forms of uncertainty to guide exploration. In this study, we investigate the role of the pupil-linked arousal system in uncertainty-guided exploration. We measured participants' pupil dilation (n = 48) while they performed a two-armed bandit task. Consistent with previous work, we found that people adopted a hybrid of directed, random, and undirected exploration, which are sensitive to relative uncertainty, total uncertainty, and value difference between options, respectively. We also found a positive correlation between pupil size and total uncertainty. Furthermore, augmenting the choice model with subject-specific total uncertainty estimates decoded from the pupil size improved predictions of held-out choices, suggesting that people used the uncertainty estimate encoded in pupil size to decide which option to explore. Together, the data shed light on the computations underlying uncertainty-driven exploration. Under the assumption that pupil size reflects locus coeruleus-norepinephrine neuromodulatory activity, these results also extend the theory of the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine function in exploration, highlighting its selective role in driving uncertainty-guided random exploration.

Exploration is an important part of decision making and is crucial to maximizing long-term reward. Past work has shown that people use different forms of uncertainty to guide exploration. In this study, we investigate the role of the pupil-linked arousal system in uncertainty-guided exploration. We measured participants’ pupil dilation (N = 48) while they performed a two- armed bandit task. Consistent with previous work, we found that people adopted a hybrid of directed, random and undirected exploration, which are sensitive to relative uncertainty, total uncertainty and value difference between options, respectively. We also found a positive correlation between pupil size and total uncertainty. Furthermore, augmenting the choice model with subject-specific total uncertainty estimates decoded from the pupil size improved predictions of held-out choices, suggesting that people used the uncertainty estimate encoded in pupil size to decide which option to explore Together, the data shed light on the computations underlying uncertainty-driven exploration. Under the assumption that pupil size reflects Locus Coeruleus-Norepinephrine (LC-NE) neuromodulatory activity, these results also extend the theory of LC-NE function in exploration, highlighting its selective role in driving uncertainty- guided random exploration.