ArticlePsychophysiology2018
If or when? Uncertainty's role in anxious anticipation.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Severe PTSD symptoms magnify episodic memory-encoding deficits and amygdala-ACC attenuation during unpredictable threat in male combat veterans.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Understanding anxiety through uncertainty quantification.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- How Temporal Predictability of Threat and Action Preparation Affect Defensive Freezing Responses.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Contingency Reversal in Conditioned Fear Learning: The Moderated Mediation Model of Intolerance of Uncertainty and Instruction.Psychology research and behavior management · 2024Article
- Don't worry, it won't be fine. Contributions of worry and anxious arousal to startle responses and event-related potentials in threat anticipation.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Intolerance of Uncertainty and Cognition in Breast Cancer Survivors: The Mediating Role of Anxiety.Cancers · 2023Article
- Sensory sensitivity, intolerance of uncertainty and sex differences predicting anxiety in emerging adults.Heliyon · 2023Article
- Association between startle reactivity to uncertain threats and structural brain volume.Psychophysiology · 2022Article
- Demarcating the boundary conditions of memory reconsolidation: An unsuccessful replication.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Intolerance of uncertainty is associated with heightened responding in the prefrontal cortex during cue-signalled uncertainty of threat.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Some fear, more loathing? Threats and anxieties shaping protective gun ownership and gun carry in the U.S.Journal of crime and justice · 2022Article
- Neural and Self-report Measures of Sensitivity to Uncertainty as Predictors of COVID-Related Negative Affect.Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging · 2022Article
- Early Safety Discrimination Under Uncertainty in Trait Anxiety: An Event-Related Potential Study.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Dissociable impact of childhood trauma and deployment trauma on affective modulation of startle.Neurobiology of stress · 2021Article
- Shared and unique neural circuitry underlying temporally unpredictable threat and reward processing.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Article
- Threat-anticipatory psychophysiological response is enhanced in youth with anxiety disorders and correlates with prefrontal cortex neuroanatomy.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN · 2021Article
- Anxiety and the Neurobiology of Temporally Uncertain Threat Anticipation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Article
- Article
- Attention and anticipation in response to varying levels of uncertain threat: An ERP study.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2018Article
- Transdiagnostic physiological correlates of unpredictable threat anticipation.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Uncertainty is often associated with subjective distress and a potentiated anxiety response. Occurrence uncertainty, or the inability to predict if a threat will occur, has rarely been compared experimentally with temporal uncertainty, or the inability to predict when a threat will occur. The current study aimed to (a) directly compare the anxiogenic effects of anticipating these two types of uncertain threat, as indexed by the eyeblink startle response, and (b) assess the relationship between startle response to occurrence and temporal uncertainty and individual differences in self-reported intolerance of uncertainty and anxiety. The findings indicated that anticipation during occurrence uncertainty elicited a larger startle response than anticipating a certain threat, but anticipation during temporal uncertainty was superior at potentiating startle blink overall. Additional analyses of the effects of order and habituation further highlighted temporal uncertainty's superiority in eliciting greater startle responding. This suggests that, while uncertainty is physiologically anxiety provoking, some level of certainty that the threat will occur enhances the robustness of the physiological anxiety response. However, self-reported anxiety was equivalent for temporal and occurrence uncertainty, suggesting that, while defensive responding may be more affected by temporal uncertainty, people perceive both types of uncertainty as anxiogenic. Individual differences in the intolerance of uncertainty and other anxiety measures were not related to anticipatory startle responsivity during any of the conditions.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.