Anxiety is Associated With Reduced Value of Control in Sequential Decision Making

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A diminished belief in self-efficacy is thought to be central to the origin and maintenance of anxiety. We recently proposed a decision theoretic model of anxiety which formalized diminished self-efficacy and found that it could explain a number of seemingly disjoint results from laboratory studies of anxiety disorders (Zorowitz et al. 2020). An untested prediction of this model is that anxious individuals should exhibit an attenuated free choice preference, i.e. that anxious individuals should be more willing to forego opportunities for future choice.