What do I do now? Intolerance of uncertainty is associated with discrete patterns of anticipatory physiological responding to different contexts

Abstract

Heightened physiological responses to uncertainty are a common hallmark of anxiety disorders. Many separate studies have examined the relationship between individual differences in intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and physiological responses to uncertainty during different contexts. Despite this, there is a scarcity of research examining the extent to which individual differences in IU are related to shared or discrete patterns of anticipatory physiological responding across different contexts. Anticipatory physiological responses to uncertainty were assessed in three different contexts (associative threat learning and extinction, threat uncertainty, decision‐making) within the same sample (n = 45). During these tasks, behavioral responses (i.e., reaction times, choices), skin conductance, and corrugator supercilli activity were recorded. In addition, self‐reported IU and trait anxiety were measured. IU was related to both skin conductance and corrugator supercilii activity for the associative threat learning and extinction context and decision‐making context. However, trait anxiety was related to corrugator supercilii activity during the threat uncertainty context. Ultimately, this research helps us to further tease apart the role of IU on different aspects of anticipation (i.e., valence and arousal) across contexts, which will be relevant for future IU‐related models of psychopathology.

It’s not over yet: The impact of worry on emotional recovery

“…Any interaction with a trait measure was followed up with pairwise comparisons of the means between the conditions for the trait measure estimated at the specific values of +1 SD or −1 SD of the mean. Similar analyses have been reported elsewhere (Morriss, 2019; Morriss & McSorley, 2019).…”

The Impact of Intolerance of Uncertainty and Cognitive Behavioural Instructions on Safety Learning

“…Based on previous findings (Morriss et al 2015(Morriss et al , 2016Morriss 2019; Morriss and van Reekum 2019), we expected:…”

“…The conditioning task was designed using E-Prime 2.0 software (Psychology Software Tools Ltd, Pittsburgh, PA) (identical to previous work, Morriss, 2019). Visual stimuli were presented at a 75 Hz refresh rate on a 21 inch colour monitor (DiamondPro, Sony).…”

“…Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) (Freeston et al 1994) has been defined as "an individual's dispositional incapacity to endure the aversive response triggered by the perceived absence of salient, key, or sufficient information, and sustained by the associated perception of uncertainty" (Carleton 2016b). Recent work has begun to examine how IU affects safety learning and has demonstrated that higher IU is associated with reduced safety learning, indexed by greater skin conductance responding to cues that no longer signal threat throughout extinction (Morriss et al 2015(Morriss et al , 2016Morriss, 2019;Morriss and van Reekum 2019). Further research has shown that individuals with higher IU are more prone to experience spontaneous recovery of learned threat (Dunsmoore et al 2015;Lucas et al 2018).…”

Intolerance of uncertainty is associated with heightened responding in the prefrontal cortex during instructed outcome uncertainty of threat

“…occurrence (if), temporal (when), content (what)). Given the important role of uncertainty in anxiety (Carleton, 2016a(Carleton, , 2016bGrupe & Nitschke, 2013), it will be important to parse out how IU is related to neural circuitry under different types of uncertain threat (Morriss, 2019). Elucidating how IU is related to the processing of uncertain threat will provide crucial information for advancing our conceptual understanding of IU and its relevance to psychopathology (Shihata, McEvoy, Mullan, & Carleton, 2016).…”