ArticleCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience2023
Anxiety as a disorder of uncertainty: implications for understanding maladaptive anxiety, anxious avoidance, and exposure therapy.
Article in Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- Resetting the hippocampal buffer: a neurocognitive account of psychedelic therapy for anxiety-related psychopathology.Psychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Article
- Investigating the Dynamic Relationship Between Anxiety and Spatial Memory Using Autonomous Ecological Momentary Assessment.Research square · 2026Article
- Increased generalisation in trait anxiety is driven by aversive value transfer.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Gone fishin'… for distinct patterns of belief-updating in late-life worry and rumination.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- From symptom-based heterogeneity to mechanism-based profiling in youth ADHD: the promise of computational psychiatry.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Acceptance of AI-assisted English language learning tools in higher education: psychological correlates across disciplinary and proficiency groups.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Reward and punishment learning among people with a lifetime history of anxiety, depression, and substance use disorder.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Understanding the Role of Loneliness in the Relationships Between Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms and Both Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms Among University Students: A Mediation Analysis.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Maternal anxiety shapes prediction error responses in the infant brain.Neurophotonics · 2025Article
- Effects of outcome uncertainty related to gain and loss, performance feedback, and individual differences during a cognitive control task.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Reviewing explore/exploit decision-making as a transdiagnostic target for psychosis, depression, and anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- Independent replications reveal anterior and posterior cingulate cortex activation underlying state anxiety-attenuated face encoding.Communications psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
In cognitive-behavioral conceptualizations of anxiety, exaggerated threat expectancies underlie maladaptive anxiety. This view has led to successful treatments, notably exposure therapy, but is not consistent with the empirical literature on learning and choice alterations in anxiety. Empirically, anxiety is better described as a disorder of uncertainty learning. How disruptions in uncertainty lead to impairing avoidance and are treated with exposure-based methods, however, is unclear. Here, we integrate concepts from neurocomputational learning models with clinical literature on exposure therapy to propose a new framework for understanding maladaptive uncertainty functioning in anxiety. Specifically, we propose that anxiety disorders are fundamentally disorders of uncertainty learning and that successful treatments, particularly exposure therapy, work by remediating maladaptive avoidance from dysfunctional explore/exploit decisions in uncertain, potentially aversive situations. This framework reconciles several inconsistencies in the literature and provides a path forward to better understand and treat anxiety.
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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.