Clinical anxiety promotes excessive response inhibition
Open accessAbstract
Background: Laboratory tasks to delineate anxiety disorder features are used to refine classification and inform our understanding of etiological mechanisms. The present study examines laboratory measures of response inhibition, specifically the inhibition of a pre-potent motor response, in clinical anxiety. Data on associations between anxiety and response inhibition remain inconsistent, perhaps because of dissociable effects of clinical anxiety and experimentally manipulated state anxiety. Few studies directly assess the independent and interacting effects of these two anxiety types (state v. disorder) on response inhibition. The current study accomplished this goal, by manipulating state anxiety in healthy and clinically anxious individuals while they complete a response inhibition task. Method: The study employs the threat-of-shock paradigm, one of the best-established manipulations for robustly increasing state anxiety. Participants included 82 adults (41 healthy; 41 patients with an anxiety disorder). A go/nogo task with highly frequent go trials was administered during alternating periods of safety and shock threat. Signal detection theory was used to quantify response bias and signal-detection sensitivity. Results: There were independent effects of anxiety and clinical anxiety on response inhibition. In both groups, heightened anxiety facilitated response inhibition, leading to reduced nogo commission errors. Compared with the healthy group, clinical anxiety was associated with excessive response inhibition and increased go omission errors in both the safe and threat conditions. Conclusions: Response inhibition and its impact on go omission errors appear to be a promising behavioral marker of clinical anxiety. These results have implications for a dimensional view of clinical anxiety.
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Other studies postulate that response inhibition is a common feature of all anxiety disorders so that a high score on the errors omission/errors commission rate correlates positively with anxiety levels.
“Other studies postulate that RI is a common feature of all anxiety disorders so that a high score on the errors omission/errors commission rate correlates positively with anxiety levels [53].”
From Response inhibition, cognitive flexibility and working memory in obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety disorder (2021) · cites this paper as [53]
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“2013) and clinical (Grillon et al. 2017) levels of anxiety - an effect that was interpreted as reflecting an adaptive function related to harm avoidance.”
Background
- Authors
- Grillon, C., Robinson, O. J., O'Connell, K., Davis, A., Alvarez, G., Pine, D. S., & Ernst, M.
- Affiliations
- National Institutes of Health (US)
- University College London (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Grillon, C.
- ORCID
- Robinson, O. J.
- Venue
- Psychological Medicine
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2016-10-25
- Volume
- 47
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 484-494
- ISSN
- 0033-2917 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-8978
- PMC
- PMC6100803
- OpenAlex
- W2533863662
- Cited by
- 56
- References
- 57
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 5
- FWCI
- 6.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- europepmc.org
- Locations
- Psychological Medicine (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health
- Medical Research Council (MR/K024280/1)
- National Institute of Mental Health (ZIAMH002798, Z01MH002798)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience › Neurotransmitter Receptor Influence on Behavior
- Keywords
- clinical anxiety, state anxiety, response inhibition, go/no-go task, response bias, signal detection sensitivity
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Anxiety Disorders, Fear, Female, Humans, Inhibition, Psychological, Male, Psychomotor Performance, Biomarkers, Signal Detection, Psychological, Young Adult
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