Study Identifies Common Decision-Making Deficit in Anxiety and Depression
A new preprint study found that both anxiety and depression impair the brain's ability to translate objective value into decision evidence, rather than simply amplifying fear or reducing motivation. Researchers used EEG recordings and computational modeling across cohorts in the US and India to isolate this effect. The findings suggest a unified cognitive mechanism may underlie decision-making deficits across both conditions.
Researchers posting to bioRxiv report that anxiety and depression share a common disruption in how the brain converts objective value into the neural signals that drive decisions. Using a risky gamble task, the team measured both behavioral choices and the centroparietal positivity — an EEG marker reflecting the accumulation of decision evidence — in independent participant cohorts from the United States and India. Computational modeling via hierarchical drift-diffusion models showed that higher symptom severity predicted weaker value sensitivity during evidence accumulation, while decision caution remained largely unaffected. Notably, classic prospect theory parameters such as risk aversion and loss aversion showed little relationship with symptom severity, challenging some prior assumptions about how affective disorders distort economic decision-making. The results point to a 'value-to-evidence interface' as the key locus of disruption, offering a more unified account than theories that treat anxiety and depression as producing distinct or opposing motivational biases. The cross-cultural replication across two independent cohorts strengthens the generalizability of the findings. Because this is a preprint, the work has not yet undergone formal peer review.
What's missing
As a preprint, this study has not yet undergone peer review. Key open questions include whether the attenuated value sensitivity reflects a trait-level vulnerability or a state-dependent effect, whether findings generalize beyond risky gamble paradigms to real-world decisions, and whether the mechanism is specific to internalizing disorders or present in other psychiatric conditions. The study is also correlational in design, limiting causal inference about whether the neural deficit drives symptoms or vice versa.
What different sources said
- bioRxivCenter
Attenuation of value-to-evidence translation drives biased decision making in anxiety and depression
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