Summary: A new study reveals that anxiety and apathy lead to fundamentally different patterns in decision-making under uncertainty. Anxious individuals perceive their environment as highly volatile, leading them to explore more options, especially after negative outcomes.
In contrast, apathetic individuals view outcomes as random, reducing their willingness to explore new choices. These findings highlight the need for tailored therapeutic approaches that account for how patients perceive and process uncertainty.
Key Facts
- Anxiety and Decision-Making: Anxious individuals perceive more volatility and explore more after failures.
- Apathy and Exploration: Apathetic individuals see outcomes as random and reduce exploratory behavior.
- Clinical Implications: Findings suggest therapies should be tailored to patients’ uncertainty perceptions.
Source: University of Minnesota
Making decisions in uncertain situations is part of daily life. New research from the University of Minnesota Medical School has uncovered that anxiety and apathy — two common but distinct emotional states — lead to fundamentally different patterns in how people learn and make decisions.
The findings were recently published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.
The study investigated how anxiety and apathy — or a lack of interest and enthusiasm — affects people’s perception of uncertainty and their subsequent decision-making behaviors.
Using a combination of behavioral experiments and computational modeling, researchers examined how more than 1,000 participants made choices in a dynamic environment where they had to repeatedly decide between exploring new options or sticking with familiar ones.
“While anxiety and apathy often occur simultaneously in clinical conditions, our findings show they actually lead to opposite patterns in how people process uncertainty and make decisions,” said Alexander Herman, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the U of M Medical School.
“This helps explain why these conditions might require different therapeutic approaches.”
Key findings include:
- Anxious individuals perceive higher environmental volatility and explore more options, especially after negative outcomes
- Apathetic individuals view outcomes as more random and show reduced exploratory behavior
- The ratio of perceived volatility to randomness mediates the relationship between anxiety and exploratory behavior
“These emotional states affect both openness to new experiences and perceptions of unpredictability of the world,” said Xinyuan Yan, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the U of M Medical School and the study’s lead author.
“For example, an anxious person might view the job market as unpredictable and requiring constant vigilance — obsessively checking job boards despite rejections. Someone experiencing apathy might see job searching as random, using the same resume — believing changes won’t matter.”
This research provides a new framework for understanding how emotional states influence decision-making, with important implications for treating neuropsychiatric conditions. The findings suggest that therapeutic approaches might be more effective if tailored to how patients perceive and process uncertainty.
Funding: This research was funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health [R21MH127607], National Institute on Drug Abuse [K23DA050909] and the University of Minnesota’s MnDRIVE initiative.
About this mental health and decision making research news
Author: Alexandra Smith
Source: University of Minnesota
Contact: Alexandra Smith – University of Minnesota
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Distinct computational mechanisms of uncertainty processing explain opposing exploratory behaviors in anxiety and apathy” by Alexander Herman et al. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging
Abstract
Distinct computational mechanisms of uncertainty processing explain opposing exploratory behaviors in anxiety and apathy
Background
Decision-making in uncertain environments can lead to varied outcomes, and how we process those outcomes may depend on our emotional state. Understanding how individuals interpret the sources of uncertainty is crucial for understanding adaptive behavior and mental well-being. Uncertainty can be broadly categorized into two components: volatility and stochasticity.
Volatility describes how quickly conditions change. Stochasticity, on the other hand, refers to outcome randomness. We investigated how anxiety and apathy influenced people’s perceptions of uncertainty, and how uncertainty perception shaped explore-exploit decisions.
Methods
Participants (N = 1001, non-clinical sample) completed a restless three-armed bandit task that was analyzed using both latent state and process models.
Results
Anxious individuals perceived uncertainty as resulting more from volatility, leading to increased exploration and learning rates, especially after reward omission. Conversely, apathetic individuals viewed uncertainty as more stochastic, resulting in decreased exploration and learning rates.
The perceived volatility-to-stochasticity ratio mediated the anxiety-exploration relationship post-adverse outcomes. Dimensionality reduction showed exploration and uncertainty estimation to be distinct but related latent factors shaping a manifold of adaptive behavior that is modulated by anxiety and apathy.
Conclusions
These findings reveal distinct computational mechanisms for how anxiety and apathy influence decision-making, providing a framework for understanding cognitive and affective processes in neuropsychiatric disorders.
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