Opposite effects of anxiety and depressive symptoms on executive function: The case of selecting among competing options

Abstract

People constantly face the need to choose one option from among many, such as when selecting words to express a thought. Selecting between many options can be difficult for anyone, and can feel overwhelming for individuals with elevated anxiety. The current study demonstrates that anxiety is associated with impaired selection across three different verbal tasks, and tests the specificity of this finding to anxiety. Anxiety and depression frequently co-occur; thus, it might be assumed that they would demonstrate similar associations with selection, although they also have distinct profiles of symptoms, neuroanatomy and neurochemistry. Here, we report for the first time that anxiety and depressive symptoms counter-intuitively have opposite effects on selection among competing options. Specifically, whereas anxiety symptoms are associated with impairments in verbal selection, depressive symptoms are associated with better selection performance. Implications for understanding the mechanisms of anxiety, depression and selection are discussed.

Keywords:

• Executive function
• Selection
• Anxiety
• Depression

We thank Bidita Dutta and David Story for assistance with data collection and members of the P50 center on Executive Function and Dysfunction for valuable discussions.

This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health [P50-MH079485 and F31-MH087073].

We thank Bidita Dutta and David Story for assistance with data collection and members of the P50 center on Executive Function and Dysfunction for valuable discussions.

This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health [P50-MH079485 and F31-MH087073].

Notes

¹ The same pattern holds for all individual tasks: The effect of anxiety alone is significant or marginal for all tasks, whereas the effect of depressive symptoms alone is non-significant and near zero (see Table 1).

² For the individual tasks, anxiety symptoms significantly predicted increased selection costs for all tasks, whereas the effects of depressive symptoms were in the same direction as the composite measure, but did not reach significance (see Table 1).

³ Reduced GABA is also found in depressed patients, who nearly always also have high anxiety (e.g., Kalueff & Nutt, 2007), but reduced glutamate is not associated with anxiety (Phan et al., 2005).