- Tuesday, August 23rd 2016 at 15:00 - 16:00 UK (Other timezones)
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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 behaviour – 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. Reinforcement learning models provide formal and testable characterizations of the mechanisms of decision-making; here, we sought to examine avoidance in these terms. We collected data from 101 healthy and pathologically anxious individuals completing an approach-avoidance go/nogo task under stress induced by threat of unpredictable shock. Using a reinforcement-learning modelling framework, we find an increased reliance in the anxious group on a parameter of the model that characterizes a low-level avoidance bias. This was particularly the case when the anxious individuals were under stress. This formal description of avoidance 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 pathological anxiety.
Oliver Robinson is a Medical Research Council funded (Career Development Award) Principal Investigator based at the institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. His lab seeks to understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying pathological anxiety.