Anxiety associated with perceived uncontrollable stress enhances expectations of environmental volatility and impairs reward learning.

ABSTRACT: Unavoidable stress can lead to perceived lack of control and learned helplessness, a risk factor for depression. Avoiding punishment and gaining rewards involve updating the values of actions based on experience. Such updating is however useful only if action values are sufficiently stable, something that a lack of control may impair. We examined whether self-reported stress uncontrollability during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic predicted impaired reward-learning. In a preregistered study during the first-wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we used self-reported measures of depression, anxiety, uncontrollable stress, and COVID-19 risk from 427 online participants to predict performance in a three-armed-bandit probabilistic reward learning task. As hypothesised, uncontrollable stress p

SUBMITTER: Guitart-Masip M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10611750 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature