Does Anxiety Impair Our Ability to Make Goal-Directed Decisions?

What you need to know

• Contrary to common assumptions, induced anxiety did not significantly impair people’s ability to make goal-directed decisions in experimental settings.
• Experiencing panic attacks or major life stressors was only weakly associated with impaired goal-directed behavior, and this relationship disappeared when accounting for compulsive tendencies.
• The findings suggest anxiety may have less impact on complex decision-making than previously thought, with implications for understanding and treating anxiety disorders.

How anxiety affects decision-making

Many people assume that feeling anxious makes it harder to make good decisions and act in a goal-directed way. The idea is that anxiety causes us to fall back on habits and automatic responses instead of carefully considering our options. However, new research challenges this common belief.

A team of researchers conducted a series of experiments to test how anxiety affects goal-directed decision-making. They used different methods to induce anxiety in participants and measure its effects on their ability to make decisions aimed at achieving specific goals.

Inducing anxiety in the lab

In the first two experiments, the researchers induced anxiety in participants by having them breathe air with higher levels of carbon dioxide (7.5% CO2). This is a well-established method for triggering feelings of anxiety in a controlled laboratory setting.

Breathing the CO2-enriched air caused clear physiological and psychological signs of anxiety in the participants:

• Increased heart rate
• Higher blood pressure
• Self-reported feelings of anxiousness, fear, and worry

So the anxiety induction was effective. But how did it impact decision-making?

Testing goal-directed behavior

The researchers used two different tasks to measure goal-directed behavior:

1. A contingency degradation task, where participants had to adjust their responses as the connection between their actions and outcomes changed.

2. A two-step decision task that distinguishes between goal-directed (model-based) and habitual (model-free) choices.

Surprisingly, participants who were made anxious by breathing CO2-enriched air performed just as well on these tasks as those breathing normal air. The experimentally induced anxiety did not seem to impair their ability to make goal-directed decisions.

Anxiety in real-world settings

To test the effects of anxiety outside the lab, the researchers also analyzed data from over 1,400 people who completed an online version of the two-step decision task.

They looked at whether people who reported:

• Having panic attacks in the past week
• Experiencing major life stressors in the past year

showed any impairment in goal-directed decision-making.

There were some small associations between these real-world anxiety experiences and slightly worse performance. However, these effects disappeared when the researchers accounted for compulsive tendencies, which are known to impair goal-directed behavior.

Implications of the findings

These results challenge the common assumption that anxiety necessarily interferes with complex decision-making and goal-directed behavior. A few key takeaways:

• Feeling anxious may not impair our ability to make thoughtful, goal-directed decisions as much as we tend to believe.

• The effects of anxiety on decision-making may be less direct than previously thought. Other factors, like compulsive tendencies, may play a bigger role.

• Treatments for anxiety disorders may not need to focus as much on improving decision-making skills, since this ability may remain relatively intact even when anxious.

• More research is needed to understand how different types of anxiety (e.g. acute vs. chronic) may impact various cognitive functions.

Limitations to consider

While these findings are intriguing, it’s important to note some limitations:

• The laboratory-induced anxiety may not perfectly mimic real-world anxiety experiences.

• The study focused on specific types of decision-making tasks. Anxiety could potentially impact other cognitive abilities not measured here.

• Individual differences in how people respond to anxiety were not fully accounted for.

Conclusions

• Experimentally induced anxiety did not significantly impair goal-directed decision-making in controlled settings.
• Real-world anxiety experiences like panic attacks showed only weak associations with impaired goal-directed behavior.
• The assumed link between anxiety and poor decision-making may need to be reconsidered, with implications for understanding and treating anxiety disorders.

While anxiety is an unpleasant experience that can impact our lives in many ways, this research suggests its effects on our ability to make goal-directed decisions may be less severe than commonly believed. More studies are needed to fully understand the complex relationship between anxiety and various cognitive functions.