ABSTRACTAnxiety is believed to have a disruptive effect on attentional control, supported by evidence of increased distractibility among high trait anxious individuals. However, how feelings of cur...

ABSTRACTThe distinctiveness of anxiety and depression is discussed concerning their nature, definitions, uses, manifestations and determinants. The objective was to examine the difference and similarity of anxiety and depression by applying the psychosemantic approach, which is a theory and methodology based on analysing the cognitive processes applied in communicating meanings. In Study 1, there were 760 participants of both genders, 23–31 years old. They were administered the Meanings Test, which yields the respondent’s meaning profile, and one of seven anxiety scales (...) or one of three depression scales. Significant correlations between the meaning profiles and the anxiety or depression scales were summarised and compared. In Study 2, there were 78 individuals over 65 years old who were administered the Meanings Test plus an anxiety or depression scale. The findings for anxiety and depression were compared within and across age groups. The results yielded two distinct meaning profiles for anxiety and depr... (shrink)

Anxiety and stress-related disorders constitute a large global health burden, but are still poorly understood. Prior work has demonstrated clear impacts of stress upon basic cognitive function: biasing attention toward unexpected and potentially threatening information and instantiating a negative affective bias. However, the impact that these changes have on higher-order, executive, decision-making processes is unclear. In this study, we examined the impact of a translational within-subjects stress induction (threat of unpredictable shock) on two well-established executive decision-making biases: the framing effect (...) ( N = 83), and temporal discounting ( N = 36). In both studies, we demonstrate (a) clear subjective effects of stress, and (b) clear executive decision-making biases but (c) no impact of stress on these decision-making biases. Indeed, Bayes factor analyses confirmed substantial preference for decision-making models that did not include stress. We posit that while stress may induce subjective mood change and alter low-level perceptual and action processes ( Robinson et al., 2013c ), some higher-level executive processes remain unperturbed by these impacts. As such, although stress can induce a transient affective biases and altered mood, these need not result in poor financial decision-making. (shrink)