nucleation

THEORY-907: As Chou, Wilson and Smith review them, in about six foraging studies, mostly sub-clinical, higher stress or anxiety went with less exploration, and in one task with a predator to check for (Trier et al. 2023), people higher in trait somatic anxiety checked less and did worse, a reduction the study's further analyses associated with greater aversion to detecting the predator

3 min read

Properties7
StatusActive
Version2
Tagspsychopathology-and-treatment, learning-and-conditioning, emotion-and-affect
SourceLIT-1483 — The influence of anxiety on exploration: A review of computational modeling studies
Bears onQUESTION-330 — How does anxiety change exploration across tasks and facets: does it reduce foraging exploration once stress and effort cost are controlled, does somatic anxiety reduce checking for threat through aversion to detecting it rather than a lower value placed on the information, and, in the same participants across more than one bandit task, does directed exploration rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and fall with state or somatic anxiety?
CorroboratesCLAIM-446 — Some persistent anxiety may be governance-maintained rather than belief-maintained: anticipated threat grants defensive processes authority over action, attention and evidence acquisition; under the avoidance that authority selects, the hypotheses that the situation is dangerous and that it is safe predict the same observation, so repeated safety need not correct the threat estimate; relief reinforces the defense without being evidence of danger; and the regime can outlast a corrected belief, its pathology, where present, being defensive authority insensitive to corrective evidence at avoidable cost
Cited as “extends” byTHEORY-1180 — In foraging tasks, higher stress or anxiety goes consistently with less exploration, and in one task with a predator to check for, people higher in somatic anxiety checked less and did worse, a reduction associated with greater aversion to detecting the predator

Graph View

Source

Chou, Wilson & Smith, LIT-1483, read in full in NOTE-1127 from the PsyArXiv preprint, version 1 (24 June 2024): pp. 20–23 and 28. The primary studies were not read.

What was actually shown

  • Acute stress (cold pressor) and chronic stress (PSS) biased foragers to stay too long, whatever the environment’s quality (Lenow et al. 2017).
  • Generalized anxiety (GAD-7) went with less exploration when leaving required physical effort (Bustamante et al. 2023), and with less adjustment of choice randomness when the environment became volatile, where randomness paid (Lloyd et al. 2022a).
  • In a foraging task with a predator, where participants could forage, check for the predator or hide, “individuals with higher trait somatic anxiety (STICSA-trait) exhibited less checking behavior (i.e., reduced exploration), which led to lower task performance” (pp. 21–22), and “these reductions in checking behavior were associated with a greater aversion to detecting the predator” (p. 22; Trier et al. 2023).
  • Human open-field and elevated-plus-maze studies found anxious people staying near the walls and in the closed arms (p. 23).

The authors’ summary: “Foraging-related exploration is deterred in those with high anxiety, perhaps due to risk aversion and/or pessimistic expectations” (p. 28).

What could have come out otherwise: anxious foragers could have left patches sooner, searching more, as some bandit results would suggest; and anxious participants in the predator task could have checked more, as a hypervigilance account predicts.

What this does not say

  • That anxiety, not stress or effort, is the cause. Several studies measured or induced stress; one turns on effort cost.
  • That checking falls in anxiety generally. One study, one facet (somatic), one task. Hypervigilance in other measures may go the other way.
  • The mechanism. “greater aversion to detecting the predator” is the result of the study’s further analyses as the review reports them; the primary paper was not read.

Connections

  • CLAIM-446. The checking result is the nearest evidence the record now holds for the claim’s defensive authority over “evidence acquisition”: less sampling of the very evidence about the threat, driven by the aversiveness of finding it. It is a single study of a facet of anxiety in a task, and it measures avoidance of detection, not authority. It also cuts against the claim’s suggestion that hypervigilance is more checking, poorly aimed: here, in somatic anxiety, there was less.
  • THEORY-910. Fits Brown et al.’s prediction that uncertainty under threat reduces exploration.
  • THEORY-917. The bandit half of the review, where the direction depends on the facet of anxiety.

Backlinks