According to the DSM-5, “Anxiety disorders include disorders that share features of excessive fear and anxiety and related behavioral disturbances” (“Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5™, 5th ed,” 2013). As an important feature of anxiety disorders, anxiety refers to the emotional response to the anticipation of future threat (Penninx et al., 2021). From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, although anxiety is an adaptive expression (Bulley et al., 2017; Fiacconi et al., 2015), especially when individuals face threats, the adaptive value of anxiety experiences for humans is unquestionable (Lang et al., 1998). But only short-lived anxiety that occurs under stress is of adaptive value, and “too much is as bad as too little”, high levels of anxiety, or excessive anxiety, will instead lead to individual deviations from normal behavior and inappropriate experiences, which will affect their normal life (Li et al., 2022; Rosa-Alcázar et al., 2021; Yang & Wang, 2011). Furthermore, the latest data show that the anxiety index of the general population has risen by 31% from two years ago (Del-Valle et al., 2022), and excessive anxiety is more likely to trigger multi-kinds of disease symptoms (especially mental disorders) (Penninx et al., 2021).
The definition of anxiety states that anxiety is oriented towards future uncertainty, and thus it is considered to be often associated with behaviors (e.g., muscle tension and vigilance, caution, or avoidance) that prepare for dealing for future danger (“Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5™, 5th ed,” 2013). So,anxiety is an individual's emotional response to future information, especially threats that may occur in the unknowable future (Penninx et al., 2021). Of course, cognitive research also confirms that anxiety affects individual cognitive tasks (Forte et al., 2021; Wei et al., 2021). Therefore, this study suggests that highly anxious individuals would present different performance outcomes in the tasks with different setting modalities, especially when influenced by different emotional primers, differential emotional effects occur in serious anxious individuals compared to slightly anxious individuals.
Perceptual recognition task is the individuals’ response to the current situation simply and requires them to make a judgment about the current stimuli, which has a deterministic outcome of correctness or incorrectness. Baumeister et al. (2001) found that when under negative emotions, people generally show enhanced effects on perceptual recognition of stimuli, that is, they show higher alertness and attention sensitivity.
However, even in cases where negative preferences are present in normal, low-anxiety populations, studies still show that high-anxiety individuals tend to show a greater cognitive preference for negative emotional stimuli (Gangemi et al., 2013; Gangemi et al., 2019; Penninx et al., 2021; Reichenberger et al., 2015; Xun et al., 2021); for example, in a visual search task, high-anxiety people searched for negative stimuli faster than low-anxiety people (Byrne & Eysenck, 1995), and in the sentence judgment task, the implicit memory of threat words in high-anxiety group was much stronger than that in neutral words, but this phenomenon was not found in low-anxiety group (Lang & Craske, 1997). However, research on positive emotions has had mixed results. Some researchers believe that compared with the greater cognitive bias in the face of negative stimuli, individuals with high anxiety have no attention bias towards positive stimuli (Hu, 2019); but some researchers have shown that individuals with high anxiety also have cognitive bias to any emotional words (including positive words), although their sensitivity to positive stimuli is lower than that to negative stimuli (Ji et al., 2021; Meng et al., 2018).
On the whole, in the task of perceptual discrimination, high-anxiety individuals have more significant negative bias, whether compared with positive bias or with other individuals. Therefore, this study hypothesizes that high-anxiety individuals show greater differences in perceptual discrimination and sensitivity between positive and negative emotional conditions than low-anxiety individuals.
When responses to the inductive reasoning tasks, in contrast, require individuals to infer about unknown future situations based on known information, and their outcomes are uncertain, so individuals’ behavioral outcomes are also influenced by the uncertainty of the future brought about by the task problem and, together with the emotional priming, affect individuals’ judgments on the relevant tasks.
Some researchers have pointed out that there is a significant correlation between attention sensitivity of high-anxiety individuals to environmental uncertainty and their response to negative stimuli (Yang & Wang, 2011). In uncertain situations, they experience a lower sense of control over the environment, and are more sensitive and alert to negative information and have difficulty shifting attention than positive and neutral stimuli (Chen, 2020). Meanwhile, studies have reported that high-anxiety individuals develop stronger feelings of disgust in high-uncertainty environment (Hezel et al., 2019; Kaur, 2017), which was named as intolerance of uncertainty (IU) (Carleton, 2016), that is, an individual’s inability to endure perceived uncertain information (such as, lack of salient, key or sufficient information). Higher IU levels are associated with higher levels of anxiety (Ladouceur et al., 2000). In defining IU, researchers have emphasized the uncertainty of the future in the concept of IU (Miranda et al., 2008), and inductive reasoning is a reasoning from known knowledge to the unknown world, which is an uncertain reasoning (Russell, 1948), so we can explore individuals’ IU levels through inductive reasoning tasks.
When faced with an uncertain reasoning task with future properties, people generally overgeneralize negative information. Meanwhile, the perceptual discrimination task after the inductive reasoning task will be affected by overgeneralization, that is, people’s discrimination will decrease, especially under the negative emotion conditions (Liang et al., 2022; Zhao & Jiang, 2017).
But high-anxiety individuals will make more efforts to reduce the uncertainty of the conclusions in inductive reasoning tasks due to higher IU, which means they will try to suppress overgeneralization responses (Miranda et al., 2008). So this study hypothesizes that, compared with low-anxiety individuals, high-anxiety individuals have lower overgeneralization responses in inductive reasoning tasks under negative emotion conditions, and are less likely to form previously conclusions in the reasoning task.
In addition, some studies have found that in the general population, simple tasks were more like to associate with automatic processing, while complex tasks were associated with control processing, so there is a significant difference in the performance of individuals on simple tasks and complex tasks (Miendlarzewska et al., 2013); but in high-anxiety groups, there was no significant difference in individual performance on simple and complex tasks (Najmi et al., 2015). Therefore, simple and complex tasks are set in this study by changing the combination rules of symbols to compare the difference of response characteristics between high-anxiety (HA) and low-anxiety (LA) groups.
To test the hypothesis proposed above, this study intends to detect the performance of high-anxiety and low-anxiety people in the tasks dealing with current (discrimination) and future (reasoning) information. And the emotional effects of individuals in these two tasks are not consistent (Heit & Hayes, 2011; Zhao & Jiang, 2017), so the study also explored the mutual influence between the two kinds of tasks (discrimination of current information and reasoning of future information) by changing the sequence of tasks. Moreover, this study adopts signal detection index, with the discrimination (d’) of perceptual discrimination task (Swets, 1973) and the projectability of the reasoning task (Liang et al., 2022) used as response variables. The research proposes the following hypotheses:
In the perceptual discrimination task,
(1) The discrimination of low-anxiety participants is affected by the emotional valence of the stimulus, the discrimination (d’) is higher in negative conditions than that in neutral conditions.
(2) Individuals with high anxiety have more significant negative cognitive biases, and their discrimination (d’) increased more obviously under negative conditions than those with low anxiety.
(3) In the reasoning-discrimination (R-D) sequence, the generalization generated by the reasoning task affects the sensitivity of individuals to stimuli in the discrimination task, so the discrimination (d’) decreases, but there is no significant reduction in discrimination (d’) of negativity of the high-anxiety (HA) group because of the highly negative biases.
In the inductive reasoning task,
(4) The projectability of low-anxiety individuals in the negative conditions is higher than that in the positive and neutral conditions, but the difference in the projectability of the high-anxiety (HA) group is smaller.
(5) When the task is performed in the order of discrimination-reasoning (D-R), the high sensitivity to stimuli brought by the discrimination task affects the generalization degree of the reasoning task, the projectability of the low-anxiety (LA) group decreases significantly while the projectability of the high-anxiety (HA) group does not decrease obviously.