The impact of anxiety on social decision-making: Behavioral and electrodermal findings

Abstract

Anxiety plays an important role in social behavior. For instance, high-anxious individuals are more likely to avoid such social interactions as communicating with strangers. In this study, we investigate the impact of anxiety on social decision-making. The classic ultimatum game (UG) paradigm was utilized in concert with skin conductance recording. Behavioral results reveal that when playing as responders, high-trait anxiety (HTA) participants with lower levels of self-esteem, as well as low-trait anxiety (LTA) participants with higher levels of impulsivity, were more likely to accept human-proposed inequitable offers. In addition, the HTA participants rejected more computer-proposed inequitable offers than did LTA participants. Moreover, the skin conductance response to inequitable offers was correlated with levels of anxiety in the HTA group, but not in the LTA group. In conclusion, people differing in levels of anxiety showed distinct behavior patterns and autonomic neural responses during social decision-making, whereas the levels of self-esteem, impulsivity, and depression might be additional moderating factors. These findings contextualize high-anxious people's avoidance tendency in social interaction.

Keywords:

• Anxiety
• Social decision-making
• Ultimatum game
• Fairness
• Skin conductance responses
• Self-esteem
• Impulsivity

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30930031, 91132704), the Ministry of Science and Technology (973 Program, 2011CB711000), the National Key Technologies R&D Program (2009BAI77B01), the Global Research Initiative Program, United States National Institute of Health grants (1R01TW007897, 5 T32 AG 242-18), the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-EW-J-8), and the Funds for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation of Beijing Normal University. The authors thank Danyang Gui and Wanqing Li for help with data acquisition and two anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the earlier versions of this article.

Notes

Tingting Wu and Yi Luo have contributed equally to the work.