Loss, but not risk, aversion dominantly contributes to maladaptive risk assessment in trait anxiety.
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Heightened loss aversion in anxiety is underpinned by attenuated functional connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal control areas.
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Both behavioral and neural loss aversion can predict decisions in anxious individuals.
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The findings suggest decreased top-down prefrontal controls over increased bottom-up processing of emotional afferents in anxiety.
Abstract
Anxious individuals tend to make pessimistic judgments in decision making under uncertainty. While this phenomenon is commonly attributed to risk aversion, loss aversion is a critical but often overlooked factor. In this study, we simultaneously examined risk aversion and loss aversion during decision making in high and low trait anxious individuals in a variable gain/loss gambling task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Although high relative to low anxious individuals showed significant increased risk aversive behavior reflected by decreased overall gamble decisions, there was no group difference in subjective aversion to risk. Instead, loss aversion rather than risk aversion dominantly contributed to predict behavioral decisions, which was associated with attenuated functional connectivity between the amygdala-based emotional system and the prefrontal control regions. Our findings suggest a dominant role of loss aversion in maladaptive risk assessment of anxious individuals, underpinned by disorganization of emotion-related and cognitive-control-related brain networks.
