Neuroscience and Mental Health group, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK.
Cogn Emot. 2020 Jun;34(4):633-642. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2019.1662373. Epub 2019 Sep 9.
Negative affective biases are thought to be a key symptom driving and upholding many psychiatric disorders. When presented with ambiguous information, anxious individuals, for example, tend to anticipate lower rewards than asymptomatic individuals (Aylward et al., 2019. Translating a rodent measure of negative bias into humans: the impact of induced anxiety and unmedicated mood and anxiety disorders. ). The assumption is that this is because anxious individuals assume "worse" outcomes. However, predictions are often made about high and low rewards, so it is not clear whether the bias is due to the valence (the "worse" option) or just magnitude (the lower number). We therefore explored the roles of valence and magnitude in a translational measure of negative affective bias. We adapted a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) "reward-reward" task into a "punishment-punishment" paradigm, and followed up with "high reward-high punishment" and "low reward-high punishment" variants. The results from the "punishment-punishment" paradigm - a bias in healthy controls - suggest that it is outcome that is important. However, this is qualified by the other variants which indicate that both valence and magnitude are important. Overall, our results temper the assumption that negative affective biases observed in tasks using numeric outcomes are solely as a result of subjective outcome valence.
消极情感偏差被认为是驱动和维持许多精神障碍的关键症状。例如，当面临模棱两可的信息时，焦虑个体往往比无症状个体预期更低的奖励（Aylward 等人，2019 年。将啮齿动物的负性偏差测量转化为人类：诱导焦虑和未经治疗的情绪和焦虑障碍的影响）。假设是因为焦虑个体假设“更糟”的结果。然而，通常会对高奖励和低奖励进行预测，因此尚不清楚偏差是由于效价（“更糟”的选项）还是仅仅是幅度（较低的数字）造成的。因此，我们探讨了在消极情感偏差的转化测量中效价和幅度的作用。我们将 2AFC“奖励-奖励”任务改编为“惩罚-惩罚”范式，并进行了“高奖励-高惩罚”和“低奖励-高惩罚”变体的后续研究。“惩罚-惩罚”范式的结果——健康对照组的偏差——表明结果很重要。然而，其他变体的结果表明，效价和幅度都很重要。总体而言，我们的结果缓和了这样一种假设，即在使用数字结果的任务中观察到的消极情感偏差仅仅是由于主观结果效价。
