Different negative biases of anxiety in discrimination and reasoning

Abstract

Abstract Background As an important feature of anxiety disorders, anxiety refers to the emotional response to the anticipation of future threat, and excessive anxiety is more likely to trigger multi-kinds of disease symptoms. The aim of this study was to detect different performance of high-anxiety and low-anxiety individuals to deal with the discrimination and reasoning tasks and the mutual influence between the two tasks. Methods A modified “reasoning-discrimination” paradigm with the discrimination (d’) of discrimination task and the projectability of the reasoning task as response variables was used. Sixty-nine participants assessed through STAI, GAD-7 and interviews, divided into two groups. Results The results revealed that all individuals showed emotional bias in discrimination tasks, but as to complex tasks, the d’ of the high-anxiety group was lower than that of the low-anxiety group, especially in neutral and positive conditions; in reasoning tasks, the difference between the two groups of emotional effects was not significant. Conclusions The findings suggest that high anxiety could impair the discrimination ability, especially the discrimination ability of the positive information, and lead to a greater negative bias. And the effects of anxiety in different cognitive domains are probably not universal, but specific.