Abstract
ABSTRACT Negative affective biases are thought to be a key symptom driving and upholding many psychiatric disorders. When presented with ambiguous information, anxious individuals, for example, tend to anticipate lower rewards than asymptomatic individuals (Aylward et al., 2019. Translating a rodent measure of negative bias into humans: the impact of induced anxiety and unmedicated mood and anxiety disorders. Psychological Medicine). The assumption is that this is because anxious individuals assume “worse” outcomes. However, predictions are often made about high and low rewards, so it is not clear whether the bias is due to the valence (the “worse” option) or just magnitude (the lower number). We therefore explored the roles of valence and magnitude in a translational measure of negative affective bias. We adapted a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) “reward-reward” task into a “punishment-punishment” paradigm, and followed up with “high reward-high punishment” and “low reward-high punishment” variants. The results from the “punishment-punishment” paradigm – a bias towards higher punishments in healthy controls – suggest that it is outcome magnitude that is important. However, this is qualified by the other variants which indicate that both valence and magnitude are important. Overall, our results temper the assumption that negative affective biases observed in tasks using numeric outcomes are solely as a result of subjective outcome valence.
Highlights
Negative affective bias refers to the phenomenon whereby patients with mood disorders, such as anxiety and depression, and many other psychiatric disorders, tend to prioritise emotionally negative or unfavourable information or outcomes (Mathews & MacLeod, 1994)
We explored the roles of valence and magnitude in a translational measure of negative affective bias
Our results temper the assumption that negative affective biases observed in tasks using numeric outcomes are solely as a result of subjective outcome valence
Summary
Negative affective bias refers to the phenomenon whereby patients with mood disorders, such as anxiety and depression, and many other psychiatric disorders, tend to prioritise emotionally negative or unfavourable information or outcomes (Mathews & MacLeod, 1994). Many cognitive tasks used to investigate affective states utilise verbal or visual stimuli (e.g. faces), a large number use numeric outcomes This may take the form of a “reward-reward” (R-R) twoalternative forced choice (2AFC) task, where the participant is required to estimate whether an ambiguous tone is closer in frequency to a tone associated with a higher reward or one associated with a lower reward (Aylward, Hales, Robinson, & Robinson, 2019). A bias towards both larger rewards and punishments (i.e. a “magnitude bias”) could signify a bias towards more “extreme” outcomes in general This is not implausible: the environment in which we live is noisy, and the brain must be able to filter out relatively unimportant information whilst being alerted to “important” inputs, regardless of whether they are perceived to be “positive” or “negative”. We isolated the negative domain task from experiment 1 and replicated a third time in the absence of reward stimuli, to demonstrate that effects are not specific to the original (task-switching) context
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