How Dose Trait Anxiety Influence The Risk Preference And Outcome Evaluation Under Three Incidental Emotion Conditions:

ObjectiveAnxiety is one of the main cause of some psychotic symptoms, such as insomnia,neurasthenia, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, etc. With the development of modern society, anxiety research has been highlighted in the field of mental health. Our research focused on illustrating the risk preference of high trait anxiety group by observing how incidental emotion affected the decision-making of both high and low trait anxiety groups. In the meantime, we also used ERPs(Event-related Potentials)technology to monitor the result evaluation of two groups under three incidental emotion conditions, which allowed us to explore the brain mechanism of cognitive process of high trait anxiety group. Our research fulfilled the theory of anxiety and could be applied to optimize the decision-making in people’s daily life.Materials and Methods500 undergraduate and graduate students were screened by State-Trait Anxiety Inventory(Trait part)(STAI-T). All of them were from Chengdu medical college. 443 valid questionnaires were recovered and listed in descending order of Trait Anxiety Score. The subjects were chosen from top 15% and bottom 15% of them and arranged in groups. The experiment was designed based on classic paradigm of game. Three kinds of Chinese facial emotional pictures(anger, happiness, fear), which could trigger subjects’ incidental emotion were presented with the two altennative numbers. The experiment was programed with E-prime 1.0. The ERPs data contained 64 EEG(electroencephalograph) signals, which were recorded by the device from German Brain Product Company. ERPs data and behavioural data were analysed by software Brain Vision Analyzer and SPSS 17.0.Results1.Both high and low trait anxiety groups had 17 subjects. The mean trait anxiety score of high trait anxiety group was 57.29±1.72, while the mean trait anxiety score of low trait anxiety group was 30.23±1.48. The T test showed significant difference between the trait anxiety scores of these two groups.(p<0.001).2.The trait anxiety affected the risk preference of decision-making significantly(P<0.05).3.The Subjective Scoring Results were also influenced by the trait anxiety. Under happiness condition, when subjects achieved “-25” points, the subjective score of high and low trait anxiety group had significant difference(p < 0.05); similarly, when subjects achieved “-5” points, the subjective score also had significant difference(p < 0.05).4.As for the ERPs data, the FRN amplitude showed there was a significant interaction between emotion and opinions of decision-making(P<0.05). The simple effect analysis of the interaction indicated that under anger condition, the FRN amplitude of big opinion of decision-making(25) was significantly higher than that of small opinion(5)(p <0.05). Besides, under fear condition, the FRN amplitude showed similar result(p <0.05). However, there was no significant difference under happiness condition(p =0.92). In addition, the main effects of high and low trait anxiety group were also not significant(p >0.05).5.The analysis of P3 amplitude indicated the main effect of result valence(win or lose) were significant(p <0.001), which the winner caused higher P3 amplitude. The main effect of the opinions of decision-making(5 or 25) were also significant(p<0.001),which bigger opinion(25) caused higher P3 amplitude. the main effects of high and low trait anxiety group were closely significant(p=0.052),the P3 amplitudes caused by high trait anxiety group were all lower than those caused by low trait anxiety group.Conclusion1.Under all three emotional conditions, the high trait anxiety group were inclined to avoid risks, compared to low trait anxiety group.2.Under happiness condition, both two groups experienced negative emotion when they lost 25 or 5 points. However, the high trait anxiety group experienced more negative emotion.3.Under anger and fear conditions, the FRN amplitude caused by big decision making risk was significantly lower than that caused by small decision-making risk.Under happiness condition, the FRN amplitude was not affected by the decision-making risk. Besides, FRN amplitude had no significant correlation with anxiety, which was against our experiment forecast. We suggest this situation might be caused by the interference of incidental emotion.4.Compared to the low trait anxiety group, the high trait anxiety group had greater negative inclination in the process of encoding, which caused brain more cognitive resources on processing of emotional information, and hence taking up the cognitive resources which the outcome evaluation processing required.