Stress Makes the Difference: Social Stress and Social Anxiety in Decision-Making Under Uncertainty.

Kristina M Hengen,Georg W Alpers

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.578293

Abstract

Stress and anxiety can both influence risk-taking in decision-making. While stress typically increases risk-taking, anxiety often leads to risk-averse choices. Few studies have examined both stress and anxiety in a single paradigm to assess risk-averse choices. We therefore set out to examine emotional decision-making under stress in socially anxious participants. In our study, individuals (N = 87) high or low in social anxiety completed an expanded variation of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). While inflating a balloon to a larger degree is rewarded, a possible explosion leads to (a) a loss of money and (b) it is followed by an emotional picture (i.e., a calm vs. an angry face). To induce stress before this task, participants were told that they would have to deliver a speech. We operationalized risk-taking by the number of pumps during inflation and its functionality by the amount of monetary gain. In addition, response times were recorded as an index of decisional conflict. Without the stressor, high socially anxious compared to low socially anxious participants did not differ in any of the dependent variables. However, under stress, the low socially anxious group took more risk and earned more money, while high socially anxious individuals remained more cautious and did not change their risk-taking under social stress. Overall, high socially anxious individuals made their decisions more hesitantly compared to low socially anxious individuals. Unexpectedly, there were no main effects or interactions with the valence of the emotional faces. This data shows that stress affects socially anxious individuals differently: in low socially anxious individuals stress fosters risk-taking, whereas high socially anxious individuals did not alter their behavior and remained risk-averse. The novel eBART is a promising research tool to examine the specific factors that influence decision-making.

Highlights

There is convincing evidence that stress and anxiety change how we evaluate the risk and benefit of an option and that they strongly influence our decisions (Kudielka et al, 2009; Pittig et al, 2015)
High socially anxious individuals were more aroused at both times than low socially anxious individuals; main effect of Social Anxiety, F(1, 83) = 14.02, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.15; Pre: t(65.76) = 3.65, p = 0.001, Post: t(80.42) = 3.12, p = 0.003
The effectiveness of our stress induction varied with the level of social anxiety; interaction Stress × Social Anxiety, F(1, 83) = 7.07, p = 0.009, FIGURE 2 | Means of the sums scores of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI)-S before and after the stress induction. (A) The group with no stress. (B) The group with the social stress induction

Summary

Introduction

There is convincing evidence that stress and anxiety change how we evaluate the risk and benefit of an option and that they strongly influence our decisions (Kudielka et al, 2009; Pittig et al, 2015) They both occupy cognitive resources during information processing (Botvinick et al, 2001) and may hinder adaptive processing of emotional as well as cognitive conflicts which might, for example, result in longer response times (e.g., Etkin and Schatzberg, 2011; Larson et al, 2013). While stress emerges when an organism is confronted with overstraining demands (Koolhaas et al, 2011), anxiety is an emotional consequence of perceived threat (see Rosen and Schulkin, 1998) Despite their documented relevance, little is known about the specific and mutual effects of stress and anxiety on risk-taking behavior, especially in decisions where approach-avoidance motivations compete against each other. Because anxiety is the most important motivation for avoidance behavior (Hofmann et al, 2008) and stress is common in many situations in daily life (McEwen, 2008), it is of special interest to investigate both states in the context of an approach-avoidance conflict

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion