Journal
BIOLOGICAL PSYCHIATRY
Volume 82, Issue 7, Pages 532-539Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2017.01.017
Keywords
Anxiety; Avoidance; Diathesis-stress; Pavlovian bias; Reinforcement learning; Threat of shock
Categories
Funding
- Medical Research Council Career Development Award [MR/K024280/1]
- Medical Research Foundation Equipment Competition Grant [C0497]
- Gatsby Charitable Foundation
- MRC [MR/K024280/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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BACKGROUND: Serious and debilitating symptoms of anxiety are the most common mental health problem worldwide, accounting for around 5% of all adult years lived with disability in the developed world. Avoidance behavior-avoiding social situations for fear of embarrassment, for instance-is a core feature of such anxiety. However, as for many other psychiatric symptoms the biological mechanisms underlying avoidance remain unclear. METHODS: Reinforcement learning models provide formal and testable characterizations of the mechanisms of decision making; here, we examine avoidance in these terms. A total of 101 healthy participants and individuals with mood and anxiety disorders completed an approach-avoidance go/ no-go task under stress induced by threat of unpredictable shock. RESULTS: We show an increased reliance in the mood and anxiety group on a parameter of our reinforcement learning model that characterizes a prepotent (pavlovian) bias to withhold responding in the face of negative outcomes. This was particularly the case when the mood and anxiety group was under stress. CONCLUSIONS: This formal description of avoidance within the reinforcement learning framework provides a new means of linking clinical symptoms with biophysically plausible models of neural circuitry and, as such, takes us closer to a mechanistic understanding of mood and anxiety disorders.
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