Making decisions in uncertain situations is part of daily life. New research from the University of Minnesota Medical School has uncovered that anxiety and apathy — two common but distinct emotional states — lead to fundamentally different patterns in how people learn and make decisions.
The findings were recently published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.
The study investigated how anxiety and apathy — or a lack of interest and enthusiasm — affects people’s perception of uncertainty and their subsequent decision-making behaviors.
Using a combination of behavioral experiments and computational modeling, researchers examined how more than 1,000 participants made choices in a dynamic environment where they had to repeatedly decide between exploring new options or sticking with familiar ones.
“While anxiety and apathy often occur simultaneously in clinical conditions, our findings show they actually lead to opposite patterns in how people process uncertainty and make decisions,” said Alexander Herman, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the U of M Medical School.
“This helps explain why these conditions might require different therapeutic approaches.”
Key findings include:
- Anxious individuals perceive higher environmental volatility and explore more options, especially after negative outcomes
- Apathetic individuals view outcomes as more random and show reduced exploratory behavior
- The ratio of perceived volatility to randomness mediates the relationship between anxiety and exploratory behavior
“These emotional states affect both openness to new experiences and perceptions of unpredictability of the world,” said Xinyuan Yan, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the U of M Medical School and the study’s lead author.
“For example, an anxious person might view the job market as unpredictable and requiring constant vigilance — obsessively checking job boards despite rejections. Someone experiencing apathy might see job searching as random, using the same resume — believing changes won’t matter.”
This research provides a new framework for understanding how emotional states influence decision-making, with important implications for treating neuropsychiatric conditions.
The findings suggest that therapeutic approaches might be more effective if tailored to how patients perceive and process uncertainty.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Minnesota Medical School.