ArticleNature human behaviour2019
Altered learning under uncertainty in unmedicated mood and anxiety disorders.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 77 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
77 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A review on exploration-exploitation trade-off in psychiatric disorders.BMC psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Amplification of positivity for depression and anxiety: Neural prediction of treatment response.Behaviour research and therapy · 2024Trial
- The Computational, Pharmacological, and Physiological Determinants of Sensory Learning under Uncertainty.Current biology : CB · 2021Trial
- Reward-induced endogenous pain inhibition scales with action-outcome certainty in humans.Pain · 2026Article
- Understanding anxiety through uncertainty quantification.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Computational mechanisms of learning and forgetting differentiate affective and substance use disorders.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Belief updating in uncertain environments is differentially sensitive to reward and punishment learning: Evidence from ERP.iScience · 2026Article
- Dissociating volatility and stochasticity reveals transdiagnostic computational signatures of psychopathology.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Anhedonia and Anxious Arousal Are Associated With Distinct Expectations About the Statistics of a Volatile Environment.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Negative Contextual Valence Unmasks Altered Counterfactual Decision-Making in Major Depressive Disorder.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Environmental uncertainty shapes human effort learning.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Affective valence as a computational signal for learning value.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- From Expectation to Learning: A Mediational Model of Exposure Therapy Outcome in Anxiety Disorders.Psychotherapy and psychosomatics · 2026Article
- Anxiety makes time pass quicker: neural correlates.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Anhedonic Traits Do Not Impair Performance in a 3-Arm Bandit Task.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Mapping affective pathways to compulsion: Insights from an aversive devaluation approach.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Article
- Interpreting Anxiety Disorders From the Perspective of Interoceptive Computational Models.Brain and behavior · 2025Review
- Computational signatures of uncertainty are reflected in motor cortex excitatory neurochemistry.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The relationship between anxious traits and learning about changes in stochasticity and volatility.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Distinct Computational Mechanisms of Uncertainty Processing Explain Opposing Exploratory Behaviors in Anxiety and Apathy.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
17 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Anxiety is characterized by altered responses under uncertain conditions, but the precise mechanism by which uncertainty changes the behaviour of anxious individuals is unclear. Here we probe the computational basis of learning under uncertainty in healthy individuals and individuals suffering from a mix of mood and anxiety disorders. Participants were asked to choose between four competing slot machines with fluctuating reward and punishment outcomes during safety and stress. We predicted that anxious individuals under stress would learn faster about punishments and exhibit choices that were more affected by those punishments, thus formalizing our predictions as parameters in reinforcement learning accounts of behaviour. Overall, the data suggest that anxious individuals are quicker to update their behaviour in response to negative outcomes (increased punishment learning rates). When treating anxiety, it may therefore be more fruitful to encourage anxious individuals to integrate information over longer horizons when bad things happen, rather than try to blunt their responses to negative outcomes.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.