Heightened Affective Reactivity Is Associated With More-Severe Symptoms of Emotional Disorders

Abstract

Disturbances of emotion are a core feature of psychological disorders generally and mood and anxiety disorders in particular. However, it remains unclear what specific patterns of affective disturbance are shared across different symptom domains. Here, we examined correlations between emotional-disorder symptom severity (anxiety, depression, hypomania, and anhedonia) and affective reactivity to gain and loss outcomes in a decision-making task with embedded sampling of emotional valence (Experiment 1: N  = 329; preregistered replication in Experiment 2: N  = 524). Using hierarchical Bayesian computational modeling of emotion self-reports, we found that greater affective reactivity to gains and losses in the task was associated with more-severe symptoms of both anxiety and hypomania. This suggests that heightened reactivity to both appetitive and aversive outcomes indexes emotional-disorder severity across multiple symptom domains of psychopathology, in line with theoretical frameworks that conceptualize affective disturbance as a generalized risk factor for psychopathology.