Individual differences in bodily freezing predict emotional biases in decision making

Abstract

Instrumental decision making has long been argued to be vulnerable to emotional responses. Literature on multiple decision making systems suggests that this emotional biasing might reflect effects of a system that regulates innately specified, evolutionarily preprogrammed responses. To test this hypothesis directly, we investigated whether effects of emotional faces on instrumental action can be predicted by effects of emotional faces on bodily freezing, an innately specified response to aversive relative to appetitive cues. We tested 43 women using a novel emotional decision making task combined with posturography, which involves a force platform to detect small oscillations of the body to accurately quantify postural control in upright stance. On the platform, participants learned whole body approach-avoidance actions based on monetary feedback, while being primed by emotional faces (angry/happy). Our data evidence an emotional biasing of instrumental action. Thus, angry relative to happy faces slowed instrumental approach relative to avoidance responses. Critically, individual differences in this emotional biasing effect were predicted by individual differences in bodily freezing. This result suggests that emotional biasing of instrumental action involves interaction with a system that controls innately specified responses. Furthermore, our findings help bridge (animal and human) decision making and emotion research to advance our mechanistic understanding of decision making anomalies in daily encounters as well as in a wide range of psychopathology.

Modeling Trait Anxiety: From Computational Processes to Personality

“…This possibility can be investigated by presenting stimuli that have acquired fear associations through classical conditioning during instrumental tasks (191). Such stimuli simultaneously inhibit appetitive approach and promote withdrawal (191–193), indicating that tendencies toward approach and avoidance are subject to indirect contextual modulation by conditioned fear stimuli. By increasing the number of aversive Pavlovian influences within the environment, generalization of fear conditioning could theoretically potentiate both effects.…”

Contrasting motivational orientation and evaluative coding accounts: on the need to differentiate the effectors of approach/avoidance responses

“…Moreover, a recent study by Ly et al (2014) provides evidence that even whole-body approach/avoidance responses were automatically triggered by valenced stimuli. The authors presented gems on the left or right side of the screen which were preceded by a task-irrelevant facial expression.…”

The relation between infant freezing and the development of internalizing symptoms in adolescence: A prospective longitudinal study

“…This is relevant as avoidance is the main maintaining and perhaps even causal factor of internalizing symptoms (Craske, ). Recent human work mainly in adults also has shown that prolonged freezing—or poor recovery from an initial freezing response—predicts subsequent instrumental avoidance responses (Ly, Huys, Stins, Roelofs, & Cools, ; Ly et al., ) and is associated with increased internalizing symptoms (Kozlowska et al., ; Niermann et al., ). Therefore, we hypothesized that freezing is adaptive, but that alterations in this defensive response early in life—in the form of longer freezing—will predict increasing levels of internalizing symptoms in childhood to late adolescence.…”