The influences of anxiety and depression in social decision making under uncertainty

Abstract

Anxiety and depression are among the most common mental health problems worldwide, and it was found that symptoms of depression and anxiety are associated with impaired decision-making ability. In a decision-making context, uncertainty may evoke emotional responses and information biases, which may affect our decision-making process. For example, previous studies in uncertain decision-making have shown that anxiety is related to increased risk aversion, i.e. the preference for certainty over risk, while depression is related to heightened loss aversion, i.e. increased sensitivity to loss versus gain. However, most of the existing literature used monetary decision-making tasks, and the effect of decision-making in uncertain social situations remain unknown. As previous research has found that monetary and social reward/punishment may have different effects, the current study aims to investigate whether anxiety and depressive symptoms would also have effects on social decision-making under uncertainty. Using an online questionnaire format, the study created three social situations, each with three kinds of framing conditions (i.e. positive, negative, and mixed conditions), forming nine vignettes in total. Two hundred and twenty-eight participants were instructed to choose in each vignette between a risk-averse option, i.e. a more certain option with a fixed reward or loss, and a risk-seeking option, i.e. a more uncertain option with potential for higher reward but also higher loss. The result showed that participants were more riskaverse in positive framing that only involves reward and more risk-seeking in the negative framing that only involves loss, indicating that uncertain social situations have a similar task effect on decision-making compared with studies using monetary rewards. Correlation analyses showed that anxiety and depressive symptoms were related to decision-making choices in one of the vignette. However, both symptoms severity were not significant predictors in the logistic regression models to predict the decision-making process. The strengths and limitations of the study were discussed.