Lower levels of directed exploration and reflective thinking are associated with greater anxiety and depression

Abstract

Anxiety and depression are often associated with strong beliefs that entering specific situations will lead to aversive outcomes – even when these situations are objectively safe and avoiding them reduces well-being. A possible mechanism underlying this maladaptive avoidance behavior is a failure to reflect on: 1) appropriate levels of uncertainty about the situation, and 2) how this uncertainty could be reduced by seeking further information (i.e., exploration). To test this hypothesis, we asked a community sample of 417 individuals to complete measures of reflective cognition, exploration, and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found significant associations between each of these measures in expected directions (i.e., positive relationships between reflective cognition and strategic information-seeking behavior or “directed exploration”, and negative relationships between these measures and anxiety/depression symptoms). Further analyses suggested that the relationship between directed exploration and depression/anxiety was due to an ambiguity aversion promoting exploration in conditions where information-seeking was not beneficial (as opposed to under-exploration when more information would aid future choices). In contrast, reflectiveness was associated with greater exploration in appropriate settings and separately accounted for differences in reaction times, decision noise, and choice accuracy in expected directions. These results shed light on the mechanisms underlying information-seeking behavior and how they may contribute to symptoms of emotional disorders. They also highlight the possibility that reflectiveness and exploration could represent novel treatment targets for those who show low levels of these tendencies – consistent with the need to develop individualized precision medicine approaches within computational psychiatry.

Piloting the Update: The Use of Therapeutic Relationship for Change – A Free Energy Account

“…This finding is likely true in many cases and especially in healthy populations. In fact, however, mental illness appears to be associated with impaired or inefficient exploration behavior ( Addicott et al, 2017 ; Cathomas et al, 2021 ; Smith et al, 2021a ) and several disorders have now been described as involving priors held with excessive precision, including depression and mood ( Seth and Friston, 2016 ; Badcock et al, 2017 ; Clark et al, 2018 ), schizophrenia and delusion ( Tschacher et al, 2017 ) and aspects of obsessive compulsive disorder ( Kiverstein et al, 2019b ). This is exactly what most clients show at the beginning of therapy.…”