Trial reportThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2018
Updating Beliefs under Perceived Threat.
Trial report in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 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
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Belief inflexibility reduces the impact of allostatic overload on psychotic-like experiences among Ukrainian refugees.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Looking on the (B)right Side of Life: Cognitive Ability and Miscalibrated Financial Expectations.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2025Article
- Trait-anxiety and belief updating: Exploring the role of negativity bias and contrast avoidance.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Optimistic bias in updating beliefs about climate change longitudinally predicts low pro-environmental behaviour.The British journal of social psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Computational Mechanisms of Information-Seeking in Anxiety.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- From perception to projection: Exploring neuroaffective advances in understanding optimism bias and belief updating.Current opinion in psychology · 2024Review
- Financial scarcity and financial avoidance: an eye-tracking and behavioral experiment.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Cardiac-Sympathetic Contractility and Neural Alpha-Band Power: Cross-Modal Collaboration during Approach-Avoidance Conflict.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Large environmental changes reduce valence-dependent belief updating.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Attitudes Formation toward Minority Outgroups in Times of Global Crisis-The Role of Good and Bad Digital News Consumption.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Inattentive responding can induce spurious associations between task behaviour and symptom measures.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Shared social identity and media transmission of trauma.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Culturally Adapting a Digital Intervention to Reduce Suicidal Ideation for Syrian Asylum Seekers and Refugees in the United Kingdom: Protocol for a Qualitative Study.JMIR research protocols · 2023Article
- Asymmetrical Update of Beliefs About Future Outcomes is Driven by Outcome Valence and Social Group Membership.International review of social psychology · 2023Article
- Expectations do not need to be accurate to be maintained: Valence and need for cognitive closure predict expectation update vs. persistence.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Neurocomputational mechanisms of affected beliefs.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Biased belief priors versus biased belief updating: Differential correlates of depression and anxiety.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- A corticostriatal pathway mediating self-efficacy enhancement.Npj mental health research · 2022Article
- Everything is connected: Inference and attractors in delusions.Schizophrenia research · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Humans are better at integrating desirable information into their beliefs than undesirable information. This asymmetry poses an evolutionary puzzle, as it can lead to an underestimation of risk and thus failure to take precautionary action. Here, we suggest a mechanism that can speak to this conundrum. In particular, we show that the bias vanishes in response to perceived threat in the environment. We report that an improvement in participants' tendency to incorporate bad news into their beliefs is associated with physiological arousal in response to threat indexed by galvanic skin response and self-reported anxiety. This pattern of results was observed in a controlled laboratory setting (Experiment I), where perceived threat was manipulated, and in firefighters on duty (Experiment II), where it naturally varied. Such flexibility in how individuals integrate information may enhance the likelihood of responding to warnings with caution in environments rife with threat, while maintaining a positivity bias otherwise, a strategy that can increase well-being.
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.