Book Description

The effects of anxiety on cognitive and emotional processing can be captured by performance on cognitive tasks under different emotional conditions. Cognitive load (difficulty), age, and state and trait-anxiety can modulate these effects. For example, adolescents may be at greater risk for the deleterious effects of anxiety because of immature brain functions. The proclivity for experiencing anxiety, as with high trait-anxiety, also influences cognitive performance. Here we examine the relationship between anxiety and cognitive performance from the perspective of cognitive resource availability and prioritization by manipulating anxiety and task difficulty. For the first two experiments, state anxiety was experimentally manipulated through the presence (threat condition) or absence (safe condition) of a threatening stimulus (a loud scream). Anxiety was assessed physiologically using eye-blink startle responses. Cognitive load was manipulated through a verbal working memory (WM) n-back task with loads of 1-back, 2-back and 3-back. To examine developmental effects of the relationship between anxiety and cognition, the first experiment compared 25 healthy adolescents (10-17 years old) with 25 healthy adults (22 - 46 years). Anxiety manipulation did not impact WM performance and physiological anxiety differently in the two age groups, however, eye-blink startle was modulated by load in adults but not adolescents. In both age groups, reduced WM accuracy was found during threat vs. safe conditions for the low and medium cognitive load tasks, but not for the high load task. Reaction times (RTs) did not differ between threat and safety conditions for low or medium loads, but were shorter during threat vs. safety at high load. Anxiety responses of eye-blink startle decreased as load increased, indicating moderation of anxiety during high load but not during low or medium loads. The results suggest that adolescents, similarly to adults, have mechanisms that prioritize task performance over the processing of threat during high cognitive load.To examine the effects of trait-anxiety, the second experiment used the same paradigm in 20 healthy low trait-anxious adults and 20 healthy high trait-anxious adults. No effects of trait-anxiety were found. Across both groups, accuracy was greater during safety than threat for medium load, but not low or high load tasks. During medium load, there were shorter RTs for the safe than threat condition. Lastly, physiological anxiety (eye-blink responses) increased as load decreased, which again indicated moderation of anxiety by the high load task, but not by the low or medium load task. In the third experiment, we manipulated anxiety through a combination of neuropeptides and social-stress, and examined their impact on decision-making. Task difficulty was modulated based on the level of decision-making complexity in a risk-taking task. Twenty-nine healthy adults (14 males) were intra-nasally administered one of three drugs, oxytocin (OT), arginine vasopressin (AVP) or placebo (PLC) in three separate sessions. Risk-taking behavior on the Stunt task was assessed in an anxiety-inducing social-stress situation (evaluation by unfamiliar peers) and a non-social context along with neuropeptide administration. OT is associated with anxiolytic effects and approach behaviors and thus should enhance risk-taking while AVP is associated with anxiogenic effects and defensive behaviors and thus should reduce risk-taking. The interaction of these neuropeptides with social manipulation should be stronger in the social-stress than non-social context. Betting-rate revealed that OT and AVP led to risk-aversion relative to PLC. AVP reduced risk-taking during positive risk-valence (high win-probability), regardless of social context or sex. In contrast, OT reduced risk-taking during negative risk-valence (low win-probability), only in the social-stress context in men. Findings revealed that both neuropeptides reduced risk-taking, possibly in a way akin to promoting defensive behavior. In sum, through manipulations of anxiety and cognitive difficulty, these three experiments allowed for a better understanding of the relationships between anxious states and cognitive processes. Specifically, there is a relationship between anxiety and cognitive performance that varies by cognitive resource prioritization which is dependent on the difficulty of the task and anxious state.