Anxiety Modulates Preference for Immediate Rewards Among Trait-Impulsive Individuals: A Hierarchical Bayesian Analysis. (November 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Haines, Nathaniel; Beauchaine, Theodore P.; Galdo, Matthew; Rogers, Andrew H.; Hahn, Hunter; Pitt, Mark A.; Myung, Jay I.; Turner, Brandon M.; Ahn, Woo-Young
• Is Part Of: Clinical psychological science. Volume 8:Number 6(2020)
• Page Start: 1017
• Page End: 1036
• Publication Date: 2020-11
• Subjects: substance use -- impulsivity -- anxiety -- delay discounting -- Bayesian statistics -- open data; Clinical psychology -- Periodicals; 616.89
• DOI: 10.1177/2167702620929636
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2167-7026

Abstract

Trait impulsivity—defined by strong preference for immediate over delayed rewards and difficulties inhibiting prepotent behaviors—is observed in all externalizing disorders, including substance-use disorders. Many laboratory tasks have been developed to identify decision-making mechanisms and correlates of impulsive behavior, but convergence between task measures and self-reports of impulsivity are consistently low. Long-standing theories of personality and decision-making predict that neurally mediated individual differences in sensitivity to (a) reward cues and (b) punishment cues (frustrative nonreward) interact to affect behavior. Such interactions obscure one-to-one correspondences between single personality traits and task performance. We used hierarchical Bayesian analysis in three samples with differing levels of substance use ( N = 967) to identify interactive dependencies between trait impulsivity and state anxiety on impulsive decision-making. Our findings reveal how anxiety modulates impulsive decision-making and demonstrate benefits of hierarchical Bayesian analysis over traditional approaches for testing theories of psychopathology spanning levels of analysis.