Affective flexibility and generalized anxiety disorder: valence-specific shifting difficulties

ABSTRACT

Background: Growing evidence suggests that generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is associated with poor affective flexibility, defined as the ability to switch between emotional aspects and non-emotional aspects of a situation. However, it is unclear whether affective inflexibility is valence-specific in GAD.

Methods: Participants with GAD (n = 21) and non-clinical control participants (n = 28) were tested on an Affective Switching Task during which participants were asked to categorize pictures either by the valence or by the number of humans present in the pictures.

Results: Individuals with GAD, but not healthy controls, exhibited greater difficulty shifting from emotional aspects of negative material compared to emotional aspects of positive material and shifting to the emotional aspects of positive material compared to emotional aspects of negative material.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that GAD is associated with valence-specific affective flexibility biases. The relevance of the findings and directions for future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Generalized anxiety disorder
• cognitive flexibility
• set-shifting
• inhibition
• cognitive bias

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Alainna Wen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3709-0762

Joelle LeMoult http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0931-2855

Randi McCabe http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6437-4982

K. Lira Yoon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1420-3736

Notes

1 When BDI scores were entered in the model, the Valence x Rule x Condition interaction in the GAD group remained significant, F(1,15) = 40.49, p = .003, ${\eta }_p^2$ = .910.

2 The findings remained the same when two extreme cases in the CTL group were removed to meet the assumption of normality. The only exception was the previously significant Condition x Group x Valence interaction for the affective rule, which became marginally significant, F(1,45) = 3.96, p = .053, ${\eta }_p^2$ = .081.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the UMaine Rising Tide/NSF ADVANCE Award to KLY.