A Preliminary Study On The Characteristics Of Decision Making In Patients With Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Background:Patients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder(GAD)has been associated with biases in cognitive processing and deficits in social performances.Many studies have reported potential social cognitive impairment,but it's still unclear whether the social behavior of GAD to affected.Temporal discounting requires individuals to weigh the gains and losses at different points in their daily lives.Risk decision is to weigh the gains and losses at risk.Social discounting is to weigh the gains and losses of individuals with different intimate relationships.These three types of decision-making are related to social behavior,and play an important role in people's daily decision-making.Objective: This study investigated the decision-making characteristics of GAD and the relationship between GAD and impaired social competence.Methods and Results:1.Experiment 1 included 36 GAD,35 GAD with depressive symptoms,and 40 healthy controls.Using the social discounting paradigm,the decision-making tendency of individual social discount is represented by the discount rate s and the area under the curve AUC.The results showed that GAD had a different social discounting's tendency from healthy controls,with a lower degree of discrimination between close individuals and a stingier social decision-making behavior toward strangers.2.Experiment 2 included 23 GAD,23 GAD with depressive symptoms,and 37 healthy controls.The mixed experimental design of group × money ×delay time was adopted to represent individual tempora discounting's tendency with discount rate k and AUC.The results showed that GAD had a different tendency of temporal selection from healthy controls,and had a lower degree of discrimination on the amount of money,preferring to choose immediate profitability.3.Experiment 3 included 23 GAD,23 GAD with depressive symptoms,and 37 healthy controls.The mixed experimental design of group × money×risk probability was adopted to represent individual risk decision's tendency with discount rate h and AUC.The trend of probability discrimination of GAD is similar to that of healthy controls,but are more likely to avoid risk than healthy controls,having lower discrimination of money amount.4.Experiment 4 included 22 GAD,22 GAD with depressive symptoms,and 37 healthy controls.Correlation analysis was conducted on the three experimental tasks.The results showed that the three decisionmaking paradigms had corresponding hyperbolic equation,but the generalized anxiety disorder patients could not better fit the model,hyperbolic function model was not fully applicable to patients with GAD;and the three decision-making tasks did not find a significant correlation trend.Conclusion: This study preliminarily explored that the patients with GAD had abnormal decision-making characteristics.With the deepening of the disease,the trend was obvious,suggesting that GAD may be related to the individual's abnormal decision-making style and social behavior.