ArticleBiological psychiatry2017
Enhanced Risk Aversion, But Not Loss Aversion, in Unmedicated Pathological Anxiety.
Article in Biological psychiatry, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 89 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
89 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A multinational analysis of how emotions relate to economic decisions regarding time or risk.Nature human behaviour · 2024Pooled it
- The influence of fear on risk taking: a meta-analysis.Cognition & emotion · 2020Pooled it
- The role of reward-related brain activity in response to treatment and later depression severity: data from a randomized controlled trial in early adolescents with anxiety disorders.Translational psychiatry · 2025Trial
- Dissociable roles of reward prediction error in the contrasting mood dynamics of depression and anxiety.eLife · 2026Article
- Understanding anxiety through uncertainty quantification.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- The recoverability, reliability, and generalizability of reward processing parameters and relation to mental health symptoms.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- A causal role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in regulating anticipated regret and risk behaviors in trait anxiety.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Alpha and Beta Powers in EEG: How Audio-Visual Stimulation Influences Anxiety.Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback · 2026Article
- Threading the Needle: Practical Considerations for Merging Theory-Driven Computational Psychiatry With Data-Driven Analytics to Enhance Precision Health at Scale.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Review
- Anxiety makes time pass quicker: neural correlates.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Modeling information demand in the framework of probabilistic reasoning.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Neural mechanisms of uncertain decision-making in anxious adolescents: an EEG study based on the balloon analogue risk task.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Feasibility of smartphone app-based neuropsychological tasks for screening people with subclinical depression and anxiety: a preliminary validation study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Individual differences in tail risk sensitive exploration using Bayes-adaptive Markov decision processes.eLife · 2025Article
- Habenula-ventral tegmental area functional coupling and risk aversion in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A computational approach to understanding effort-based decision-making in depression.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- A computational approach to understanding effort-based decision-making in depression.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Estimation-uncertainty affects decisions with and without learning opportunities.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Digital measures of activity and motivation impact depression and anxiety in the real world.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- The Value of Non-Instrumental Information in Anxiety: Insights from a Resource-Rational Model of Planning.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
29 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundAnxiety disorders are associated with disruptions in both emotional processing and decision making. As a result, anxious individuals often make decisions that favor harm avoidance. However, this bias could be driven by enhanced aversion to uncertainty about the decision outcome (e.g., risk) or aversion to negative outcomes (e.g., loss). Distinguishing between these possibilities may provide a better cognitive understanding of anxiety disorders and hence inform treatment strategies.
methodsTo address this question, unmedicated individuals with pathological anxiety (n = 25) and matched healthy control subjects (n = 23) completed a gambling task featuring a decision between a gamble and a safe (certain) option on every trial. Choices on one type of gamble-involving weighing a potential win against a potential loss (mixed)-could be driven by both loss and risk aversion, whereas choices on the other type-featuring only wins (gain only)-were exclusively driven by risk aversion. By fitting a computational prospect theory model to participants' choices, we were able to reliably estimate risk and loss aversion and their respective contribution to gambling decisions.
resultsRelative to healthy control subjects, pathologically anxious participants exhibited enhanced risk aversion but equivalent levels of loss aversion.
conclusionsIndividuals with pathological anxiety demonstrate clear avoidance biases in their decision making. These findings suggest that this may be driven by a reduced propensity to take risks rather than a stronger aversion to losses. This important clarification suggests that psychological interventions for anxiety should focus on reducing risk sensitivity rather than reducing sensitivity to negative outcomes per se.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.