Uncertainty and Anticipation in Anxiety

By D. Grupe, Jack B. Nitschke. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2013

1,711 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Uncertainty about a possible future threat disrupts our ability to avoid it or to mitigate its negative impact and thus results in anxiety. Here, we focus the broad literature on the neurobiology of anxiety through the lens of uncertainty. We identify five processes that are essential for adaptive anticipatory responses to future threat uncertainty and propose that alterations in the neural instantiation of these processes result in maladaptive responses to uncertainty in pathological anxiety. This framework has the potential to advance the classification, diagnosis and treatment of clinical anxiety.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/76c65983fa7dc2ad5afb5128da8f60ef082964b2

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

How Financial Constraints Influence Consumer Behavior: An Integrative Framework (2018, background): “Uncertainty stemming from financial constraints is stressful and threatening (De Witte, Pienaar, & De Cuyper, 2016; Grupe & Nitschke, 2013).”
Anxiety and climate change: a validation of the Climate Anxiety Scale in a German-speaking quota sample and an investigation of psychological correlates (2021, background): “Furthermore, helplessness and powerlessness are typical anxious experiences that represent diminished efficacy and control beliefs (Grupe & Nitschke 2013), in other words, Climatic Change (2021) 168:20 1 3 Page 5 of 23 20 thwarted needs for competence.”
Eco-Anxiety and Environmental Education (2020, background): “In addition, as anxiety scholars Grupe and Nitschke [48] point out, anxiety and depression may intertwine: “Mixed anxiety and depression is characterized by uncertainty about the occurrence of negative events and feelings of helplessness regarding control over those events” (p. 489).”
Speaking Up When Water Is Murky: An Uncertainty-Based Model Linking Perceived Organizational Politics to Employee Voice (2018, background): “The unknown personal cost of speaking up produces an avoidance tendency among employees at work (Grupe & Nitschke, 2013; Hirsh et al., 2012).”
Bearing worlds: learning to live-with climate change (2019, background): “Uncertainty is said to be central to anxiety, which is an emotional state characterised by worry about the future (Grupe and Nitschke 2013).”
Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-Anxiety and Climate Anxiety (2020, background): “Anxiety scholars Grupe and Nitschke [22] point out that: “Mixed anxiety and depression is characterized by uncertainty about the occurrence of negative events and feelings of helplessness regarding control over those events” (p.”
An intracranial dissection of human escape circuits (2024, unknown): “The insula is known for encoding anticipated decision-making, particularly involving risk assessments and adjustments based on “ risk prediction errors ” as outcomes are revealed 53,72,73 .”
Monitoring pilot trainees’ cognitive control under a simulator-based training process with EEG microstate analysis (2024, unknown): “To align our research with the reported effect of task demands, difficulty, and uncertainty on cognitive control in the literature 17,62–67 , we conducted paired comparisons between the two types of tasks: Baseline tasks and Trial tasks.”