The impact of induced anxiety on affective response inhibition

Abstract

Studying the effects of experimentally induced anxiety in healthy volunteers may increase our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning anxiety disorders. Experimentally induced stress (via threat of unpredictable shock) improves accuracy at withholding a response on the sustained attention to response task (SART), and in separate studies improves accuracy to classify fearful faces, creating an affective bias. Integrating these findings, participants at two public science engagement events (n = 46, n = 55) were recruited to explore the effects of experimentally induced stress on an affective version of the SART. We hypothesized that we would see an improved accuracy at withholding a response to affectively congruent stimuli (i.e. increased accuracy at withholding a response to fearful ‘no-go’ distractors) under threat of shock. Induced anxiety slowed reaction time, and at the second event quicker responses were made to fearful stimuli. However, we did not observe improved inhibition overall during induced anxiety, and there was no evidence to suggest an interaction between induced anxiety and stimulus valence on response accuracy. Indeed Bayesian analysis provided decisive evidence against this hypothesis. We suggest that the presence of emotional stimuli might make the safe condition more anxiogenic, reducing the differential between conditions and knocking out any threat-potentiated improvement.

Toward a Standardized Test of Fearful Temperament in Primates: A Sensitive Alternative to the Human Intruder Task for Laboratory-Housed Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta)

“…For example, participants diagnosed with negative mood disorders more accurately inhibit responding on a cognitive task when threatened with unpredictable shock, suggesting state stress enhances behavioral inhibition (Mkrtchian et al, 2017). Aylward et al (2017), however, failed to find an effect of threat of unpredictable shock on behavioral inhibition in a non-clinical sample, indicating that behavioral inhibition under stress identifies clinical, but not sub-clinical, populations. We therefore might expect not to see behavioral inhibition in a (presumably) sub-clinical group of monkeys under baseline conditions.…”

“…Additional factors that may have influenced performance on the touch-screen task include mismatching effects (e.g., touch a negative stimulus to gain a positive reward, which has been shown to exacerbate the impact of transient emotion states on task performance (Raoult et al, 2017), and influence of attentional processes (Bar-Haim et al, 2007). For example, Aylward et al (2017) found faster responses by human participants taking part in a computer task to fearful faces compared to happy faces, which was independent of affective state (threat of electric shock). The authors attributed this speeding of response to attentional capture by negative stimuli.…”

“…We argue these paradigms can be adapted for use with non-human primates. Tasks typically measure reaction-time to detect targets that appear on a screen on which threat cues are also presented (Fox et al, 2001; Algom et al, 2004; Mogg et al, 2008; Frings et al, 2010; Hommer et al, 2014; Aylward et al, 2017; Mkrtchian et al, 2017). Within the literature there is a general consensus that response-slowing, or total inhibition of response, to threatening (as opposed to non-threatening) stimuli is associated with negative affect.…”

The ‘Threat of Scream’ paradigm: a tool for studying sustained physiological and subjective anxiety

“…First, as in the majority of the threat of shock studies (i.e. 60 , 61 ), aversive stimuli were delivered only in threat blocks while participants did not receive any stimulation in safe ones. This difference in stimulation could be involved in the observed SCL differences.…”

Trait Anxiety Attenuates Response Inhibition: Evidence From an ERP Study Using the Go/NoGo Task

“…From this perspective, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience studies have revealed that the medial prefrontal regions [including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)] are crucial substrates of the human anxiety circuitry (Sehlmeyer et al, 2009) and that deficits in these areas are associated with impaired inhibition control (Sehlmeyer et al, 2010). Although previous studies have shown that individuals with state anxiety (e.g., experimentally induced anxiety; see Aylward et al, 2017), anxiety with substance use (Karch et al, 2007), and clinical anxious patients (Grillon et al, 2017) have deficits in response inhibition, the question remains on whether and at what extent anxiety-related personality traits (e.g., trait anxiety) can also modulate response inhibition. Recent studies have demonstrated that trait anxiety interrupts top-down goal-driven processes such as response inhibition, resulting in failures in the inhibition function that enable executive control over prepotent motor responses (Pacheco-Unguetti et al, 2012;Su-Hao et al, 2014).…”