A new study led by researchers at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) has shed light on how acute anxiety influences the way people make decisions, revealing that feeling anxious can lead to more random, less goal-directed choices.
The research, led by Dr Georgios Tertikas as part of his PhD at BSMS, has been accepted for publication in The Journal of Neuroscience, the flagship journal of the Society for Neuroscience.
Exploring how anxiety affects choice
Everyday decisions involve a balance between sticking with familiar options and exploring new possibilities. To better understand how anxiety affects this balance, the research team conducted an experiment with 47 healthy participants at the Clinical Imaging Sciences Centre (CISC) on the University of Sussex campus.
Participants completed a decision-making task while undergoing functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans. To induce temporary anxiety, researchers introduced the threat of unpredictable mild electric shocks during parts of the experiment.
The results showed that acute anxiety does not increase purposeful exploration or curiosity-driven behaviour. Instead, it significantly increases what researchers describe as “random, value-free exploration” – decisions that are less guided by past experience or expected outcomes.
A distinct effect on the brain
The study also identified specific brain mechanisms underlying this behaviour. Increased randomness in decision-making was linked to altered activity in frontoparietal brain regions involved in cognitive control and decision processes.
In particular, the findings highlight increased activation in areas such as the superior parietal lobule and frontopolar cortex during anxious states. These changes were observed independently of value-based decision processes, suggesting that anxiety introduces a form of “decision noise” rather than broadly impairing reasoning.
A novel approach to understanding anxiety
The study is the first of its kind to combine experimentally induced anxiety, computational modelling, and neuroimaging to distinguish between different types of exploratory behaviour.
Previous research has largely focused on long-term (trait) anxiety and typically treated exploration as a single process. By contrast, this work separates exploration into distinct strategies and shows that anxiety selectively affects only certain types.
These insights could have important implications for understanding how anxiety disorders impact everyday functioning, particularly in situations that require flexible and adaptive decision-making.
The research was designed, conducted and analysed through BSMS, forming the central empirical component of Dr Tertikas’s doctoral work. It involved collaboration with partners at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research and the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL.
The study was supported by a BSMS Clinical Research Fellowship, alongside funding from the Wellcome Trust, the European Research Council (ERC), and the Medical Research Council (MRC-UKRI).
The paper, titled 'Acute Anxiety Selectively Enhances Value-Free Random Exploration Through Frontoparietal Engagement,' is authored by Georgios Tertikas, Magda Dubois, Tobias U. Hauser, Daniel K. Campbell-Meiklejohn, and Hugo D. Critchley.