Sandhu Timothy R, Xiao Bowen, Lawson Rebecca P
Department of Psychology, Downing Place, University of Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK; MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, CB2 7EF, UK.
Department of Psychology, Downing Place, University of Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.
Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2023 May;148:105123. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105123. Epub 2023 Mar 11.
People radically differ in how they cope with uncertainty. Clinical researchers describe a dispositional characteristic known as "intolerance of uncertainty", a tendency to find uncertainty aversive, reported to be elevated across psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions. Concurrently, recent research in computational psychiatry has leveraged theoretical work to characterise individual differences in uncertainty processing. Under this framework, differences in how people estimate different forms of uncertainty can contribute to mental health difficulties. In this review, we briefly outline the concept of intolerance of uncertainty within its clinical context, and we argue that the mechanisms underlying this construct may be further elucidated through modelling how individuals make inferences about uncertainty. We will review the evidence linking psychopathology to different computationally specified forms of uncertainty and consider how these findings might suggest distinct mechanistic routes towards intolerance of uncertainty. We also discuss the implications of this computational approach for behavioural and pharmacological interventions, as well as the importance of different cognitive domains and subjective experiences in studying uncertainty processing.
人们在应对不确定性的方式上存在极大差异。临床研究人员描述了一种被称为“不确定性不耐受”的性格特征，即一种认为不确定性令人厌恶的倾向，据报道，在精神疾病和神经发育疾病中这种倾向会增强。与此同时，计算精神病学领域的最新研究利用理论工作来描述不确定性处理方面的个体差异。在此框架下，人们对不同形式不确定性的估计方式差异可能导致心理健康问题。在本综述中，我们简要概述了临床背景下不确定性不耐受的概念，并认为通过对个体如何对不确定性进行推理进行建模，可能会进一步阐明这一概念的潜在机制。我们将回顾将精神病理学与不同计算指定形式的不确定性联系起来的证据，并考虑这些发现如何可能暗示导致不确定性不耐受的不同机制途径。我们还将讨论这种计算方法对行为和药物干预的意义，以及不同认知领域和主观体验在研究不确定性处理中的重要性。
