Adaptive behavior can produce maladaptive anxiety due to individual differences in experience
Frazer Meacham, Carl T. Bergstrom

TL;DR
This paper presents a signal detection model explaining how adaptive learning processes can lead to maladaptive anxiety, with individuals becoming trapped in over-sensitivity due to exploration-exploitation tradeoffs, shedding light on the evolution of anxiety disorders.
Contribution
It introduces a novel signal detection framework showing how individual differences in environmental sampling can cause maladaptive anxiety, highlighting the role of exploration-exploitation dynamics.
Findings
Over-sensitivity to threats can become self-perpetuating.
Optimal strategies involve a tradeoff between sampling and acting.
Over-sensitivity is more common than under-sensitivity.
Abstract
Normal anxiety is considered an adaptive response to the possible presence of danger, but is susceptible to dysregulation. Anxiety disorders are prevalent at high frequency in contemporary human societies, yet impose substantial disability upon their sufferers. This raises a puzzle: why has evolution left us vulnerable to anxiety disorders? We develop a signal detection model in which individuals must learn how to calibrate their anxiety responses: they need to learn which cues indicate danger in the environment. We derive the optimal strategy for doing so, and find that individuals face an inevitable exploration-exploitation tradeoff between obtaining a better estimate of the level of risk on one hand, and maximizing current payoffs on the other. Because of this tradeoff, a subset of the population can become trapped in a state of self-perpetuating over-sensitivity to threatening…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEvolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolution and Genetic Dynamics · Mental Health Research Topics
