Risk and loss aversion and attitude to COVID and vaccines in anxious individuals

Abstract

AbstractAnxious individuals are known to show impaired decision-making in economic gambling task and in everyday life decisions. This impairment can be due to aversion to uncertainty about outcomes (risk aversion) and/or aversion to negative outcomes (loss aversion). We investigate how non-clinical individuals with high levels of Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) (N = 54) behave compared to less anxious subjects (N = 61) in a gambling decision-making task delivered online and designed to separate the distinct influences of risk and loss aversion on decision-making. By modelling subjects’ choices using computational models derived from Prospect Theory and fitted using Hierarchical Bayesian methods, we estimate individual levels of risk and loss aversion. We also link estimates of these parameters to individual propensity to risk averse behaviours during the COVID pandemic, like wearing safer types of face masks, or completing a COVID vaccination course. We report increased loss aversion in individuals with increased level of GAD compared to less anxious individuals and no differences in risk aversion. We also report no links between risk and loss aversion and attitudes towards COVID and vaccines. These results shed new light on the interplay of anxiety and risk and loss aversion and they can provide useful directions for clinical intervention.1Author SummaryIn everyday life, we are constantly faced with decisions in which we need to balance between possible losses and risks. In general, humans are believed to weight losses more than gains, i.e. they are loss averse, and they prefer certain to uncertain outcomes, i.e. they are risk averse. The COVID pandemic made this balance between risks, losses and everyday life even more explicit: should I get a COVID vaccination? What type of mask should I wear? Here, we investigate these constructs using a gambling task delivered online in which participants have to accept or refuse bets involving monetary gains, losses or sure wins. We also capture individual attitudes to COVID and vaccines with a new self-report questionnaire. We find that individuals with high levels of Generalised Anxiety Disorder present higher levels of loss aversion compared to less anxious individuals and no differences in risk aversion. We also report no links between computational measures of risk and loss aversion and attitude to COVID and vaccines, possibly due to limits in using simple tasks to describe behaviours through complex situations like the COVID pandemic.