Approach-Avoidance Decisions Under Threat: The Role of Autonomic Psychophysiological States

Social threat avoidance depends on action-outcome predictability

Avoiding threatening individuals is pivotal for adaptation to our social environment. Yet, it remains unclear whether social threat avoidance is subtended by goal-directed processes, in addition to stimulus-response associations. To test this, we manipulated outcome predictability during spontaneous approach/avoidance decisions from avatars displaying angry facial expressions. Across three virtual reality experiments, we showed that participants avoided more often when they could predict the outcome of their actions, indicating goal-directed processes. However, above-chance avoidance rate when facing unpredictable outcomes suggested that stimulus-response associations also played a role. We identified two latent classes of participants: the "goal-directed class" showed above-chance avoidance only in the predictable condition, while the "stimulus-response class" showed no credible difference between conditions but had a higher overall avoidance rate. The goal-directed class exhibited greater cardiac deceleration in the predictable condition, associated with better value integration in decision-making. Computationally, this class had an increased drift-rate in the predictable condition, reflecting increased value estimation of threat avoidance. In contrast, the stimulus-response class showed higher responsiveness to threat, indicated by increased drift-rate for avoidance and increased muscular activity at response time. These results support the central role of goal-directed processes in social threat avoidance and reveal its physiological and computational correlates.

Acute stress yields a sex-dependent facilitation of signaled active avoidance in rats

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating disorder characterized by excessive fear, hypervigilance, and avoidance of thoughts, situations or reminders of the trauma. Among these symptoms, relatively little is known about the etiology of pathological avoidance. Here we sought to determine whether acute stress influences avoidant behavior in adult male and female rats. We used a stress procedure (unsignaled footshock) that is known to induce long-term sensitization of fear and potentiate aversive learning. Rats were submitted to the stress procedure and, one week later, underwent two-way signaled active avoidance conditioning (SAA). In this task, rats learn to prevent an aversive outcome (shock) by performing a shuttling response when exposed to a warning signal (tone). We found that acute stress significantly enhanced SAA acquisition rate in females, but not males. Female rats exhibited significantly greater avoidance responding on the first day of training relative to controls, reaching similar levels of performance by the second day. Males that underwent the stress procedure showed similar rates of acquisition to controls but exhibited resistance to extinction. This was manifest as both elevated avoidance and intertrial responding across extinction days relative to non-stressed controls, an effect that was not observed in females. In a second experiment, acute stress sensitized footshock unconditioned responses in males, not females. However, males and females exhibited similar levels of stress-enhanced fear learning (SEFL), which was expressed as sensitized freezing to a shock-paired context. Together, these results reveal that acute stress facilitates SAA performance in both male and female rats, though the nature of this effect is different in the two sexes. We did not observe sex differences in SEFL, suggesting that the stress-induced sex difference in performance was selective for instrumental avoidance. Future work will elucidate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the differential effect of stress on instrumental avoidance in male and female rats.

Cognitive Signatures of Depressive and Anhedonic Symptoms and Affective States Using Computational Modeling and Neurocognitive Testing

BACKGROUND

Deeper phenotyping may improve our understanding of depression. Because depression is heterogeneous, extracting cognitive signatures associated with severity of depressive symptoms, anhedonia, and affective states is a promising approach.

METHODS

Sequential sampling models decomposed behavior from an adaptive approach-avoidance conflict task into computational parameters quantifying latent cognitive signatures. Fifty unselected participants completed clinical scales and the approach-avoidance conflict task by either approaching or avoiding trials offering monetary rewards and electric shocks.

RESULTS

Decision dynamics were best captured by a sequential sampling model with linear collapsing boundaries varying by net offer values, and with drift rates varying by trial-specific reward and aversion, reflecting net evidence accumulation toward approach or avoidance. Unlike conventional behavioral measures, these computational parameters revealed distinct associations with self-reported symptoms. Specifically, passive avoidance tendencies, indexed by starting point biases, were associated with greater severity of depressive symptoms (R = 0.34, p = .019) and anhedonia (R = 0.49, p = .001). Depressive symptoms were also associated with slower encoding and response execution, indexed by nondecision time (R = 0.37, p = .011). Higher reward sensitivity for offers with negative net values, indexed by drift rates, was linked to more sadness (R = 0.29, p = .042) and lower positive affect (R = -0.33, p = .022). Conversely, higher aversion sensitivity was associated with more tension (R = 0.33, p = .025). Finally, less cautious response patterns, indexed by boundary separation, were linked to more negative affect (R = -0.40, p = .005).

CONCLUSIONS

We demonstrated the utility of multidimensional computational phenotyping, which could be applied to clinical samples to improve characterization and treatment selection.

Does a junior doctor focused 'Bootcamp' improve the confidence and preparedness of newly appointed ENT registrars to perform their job roles?

BACKGROUND

To assess changes in confidence and preparedness after conducting a 2-day induction bootcamp for novice Ear Nose and Throat (ENT) first year specialty trainee registrars (ST3s) in the United Kingdom (UK). The bootcamp covered common ENT presentations on the ward, and in the elective and emergency settings.

METHODS

A total of 32 trainees (ST3 or research fellow) voluntarily registered via an online application form to the Southern ST3 accelerated learning course bootcamp through ENT UK. ENT UK is a membership body that supports ENT trainees throughout their careers. They completed a two-day bootcamp that was hosted at St Mary's Hospital, London and 10 skills sessions were delivered by either a senior ENT registrar or an ENT consultant. A pre-session questionnaire was distributed to all participants and a post-session questionnaire was provided that assessed the changes in confidence and preparedness of the participants, if any. The responses were scored by a 10-point Likert scale. Only participants who fully completed the pre and post questionnaire were included, which was 29 in total.

RESULTS

Participants self-reported a significant increase in confidence (p < 0.001) and preparedness (p < 0.001) following the bootcamp course. The greatest improvements in comparison to all other stations were self-preparedness in the rigid bronchoscopy station and self-confidence in the sphenopalatine artery (SPA) ligation station.

CONCLUSION

The use of a two-day bootcamp improved confidence and preparedness of managing common ENT presentations in the ward, elective and emergency settings for ENT ST3s. It provides a useful adjunct in the acquisition of technical and non-technical skills alongside the traditional surgical apprenticeship. In the future, more work is required to assess the impact of bootcamps on patient outcomes and long-term benefits on trainees' skill retention and clinical proficiency.

Acute stress promotes effort mobilization for safety-related goals

Although the acute stress response is a highly adaptive survival mechanism, much remains unknown about how its activation impacts our decisions and actions. Based on its resource-mobilizing function, here we hypothesize that this intricate psychophysiological process may increase the willingness (motivation) to engage in effortful, energy-consuming, actions. Across two experiments (n = 80, n = 84), participants exposed to a validated stress-induction protocol, compared to a no-stress control condition, exhibited an increased willingness to exert physical effort (grip force) in the service of avoiding the possibility of experiencing aversive electrical stimulation (threat-of-shock), but not for the acquisition of rewards (money). Use of computational cognitive models linked this observation to subjective value computations that prioritize safety over the minimization of effort expenditure; especially when facing unlikely threats that can only be neutralized via high levels of grip force. Taken together, these results suggest that activation of the acute stress response can selectively alter the willingness to exert effort for safety-related goals. These findings are relevant for understanding how, under stress, we become motivated to engage in effortful actions aimed at avoiding aversive outcomes.

Brain Mechanisms Underlying Panic Attack and Panic Disorder

Panic disorder is a psychiatric disorder characterized by recurrent panic attacks, with a prevalence of ~ 4% in the general population, causing heavy personal and socioeconomic burdens. The similarities of animal defense responses to clinical panic attack symptoms in humans make it possible to translate neuroanatomical pathways identified in animal studies to panic disorder in humans. Therefore, in this review we first present a basic overview of panic disorder in humans including the main subtypes, models commonly used to trigger panic attacks, related hypotheses, the neurotransmitter systems that may be involved, and the current clinical treatments to give the reader a comprehensive understanding of panic disorder. The animal section introduces the models that trigger panic-like behavior in animals and the brain regions that may be involved, providing insights for future elucidation of the neural circuit mechanisms behind panic attacks.

The neurocomputational link between defensive cardiac states and approach-avoidance arbitration under threat

Avoidance, a hallmark of anxiety-related psychopathology, often comes at a cost; avoiding threat may forgo the possibility of a reward. Theories predict that optimal approach-avoidance arbitration depends on threat-induced psychophysiological states, like freezing-related bradycardia. Here we used model-based fMRI analyses to investigate whether and how bradycardia states are linked to the neurocomputational underpinnings of approach-avoidance arbitration under varying reward and threat magnitudes. We show that bradycardia states are associated with increased threat-induced avoidance and more pronounced reward-threat value comparison (i.e., a stronger tendency to approach vs. avoid when expected reward outweighs threat). An amygdala-striatal-prefrontal circuit supports approach-avoidance arbitration under threat, with specific involvement of the amygdala and dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC) in integrating reward-threat value and bradycardia states. These findings highlight the role of human freezing states in value-based decision making, relevant for optimal threat coping. They point to a specific role for amygdala/dACC in state-value integration under threat.

Acute stress yields a sex-dependent facilitation of signaled active avoidance in rats

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating disorder characterized by excessive fear, hypervigilance, and avoidance of thoughts, situations or reminders of the trauma. Among these symptoms, relatively little is known about the etiology of pathological avoidance. Here we sought to determine whether acute stress influences avoidant behavior in adult male and female rats. We used a stress procedure (unsignaled footshock) that is known to induce long-term sensitization of fear and potentiate aversive learning. Rats were submitted to the stress procedure and, one week later, underwent two-way signaled active avoidance conditioning (SAA). In this task, rats learn to prevent an aversive outcome (shock) by performing a shuttling response when exposed to a warning signal (tone). We found that acute stress significantly enhanced SAA acquisition rate in females, but not males. Female rats exhibited significantly greater avoidance responding on the first day of training relative to controls, reaching similar levels of performance by the second day. Males that underwent the stress procedure showed similar rates of acquisition to controls but exhibited resistance to extinction. This was manifest as both elevated avoidance and intertrial responding across extinction days relative to non-stressed controls, an effect that was not observed in females. In a second experiment, acute stress sensitized footshock unconditioned responses in males, not females. However, males and females exhibited similar levels of stress-enhanced fear learning (SEFL), which was expressed as sensitized freezing to a shock-paired context. Together, these results reveal that acute stress facilitates SAA performance in both male and female rats, though the nature of this effect is different in the two sexes. We did not observe sex differences in SEFL, suggesting that the stress-induced sex difference in performance was selective for instrumental avoidance. Future work will elucidate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the differential effect of stress on instrumental avoidance in male and female rats.

Keeping distance or getting closer: How others' emotions shape approach-avoidance postural behaviors and preferred interpersonal distance

Understanding the influence of emotions on social interactions is important for a global understanding of the dynamics of human behavior. In this study, we investigated the interplay between emotions, spontaneous approach or avoidance tendencies, and the regulation of interpersonal distance. Fifty-seven healthy adults participated in a three-part experiment involving exposure to approaching or withdrawing emotional faces (neutral, happy, sad, fearful, disgusted, angry). The sequence began with an initial computerized stop-distance task, followed by a postural task in which participants' approach or avoidance tendencies were quantified via center of pressure (CoP-Y) displacements on a force platform, and concluded with a final computerized stop-distance task. Our findings revealed a gradient in postural responses, with the most forward CoP-Y displacements for neutral and happy faces, indicative of approach tendencies. These were followed by lesser forward displacements for sad and fearful faces, and most pronounced backward displacements for disgusted and angry faces, indicating avoidance. Furthermore, we observed modulations in participants' preferred interpersonal distance based on emotional cues, with neutral and happy faces associated with shorter distances, and disgusted and angry faces linked to larger distances. Despite these similar results, no direct correlation was found between CoP-Y and preferred interpersonal distance, underscoring a dissociation between spontaneous and voluntary social behaviors. These results contribute to a better understanding of how emotional expressions shape social interactions and underscore the importance of considering emotional cues, postural action tendencies, and interpersonal distance in facilitating successful social interactions.

Facial infrared thermography as an index of social anxiety

Previous research on physiological indices of social anxiety has offered unclear results. In this study, participants with low and high social anxiety performed five social interaction tasks while being recorded with a thermal camera. Each task was associated with a dimension assessed by the Social Anxiety Questionnaire for Adults (1 = Interactions with strangers. 2 = Speaking in public/Talking with people in authority, 3 = Criticism and embarrassment, 4 = Assertive expression of annoyance, disgust or displeasure, 5 = Interactions with the opposite sex). Mixed-effects models revealed that the temperature of the tip of the nose decreased significantly in participants with low (vs. high) social anxiety (p < 0.001), while no significant differences were found in other facial regions of interest: forehead (p = 0.999) and cheeks (p = 0.999). Furthermore, task 1 was the most effective at discriminating between the thermal change of the nose tip and social anxiety, with a trend for a higher nose temperature in participants with high social anxiety and a lower nose temperature for the low social anxiety group. We emphasize the importance of corroborating thermography with specific tasks as an ecological method, and tip of the nose thermal change as a psychophysiological index associated with social anxiety.

The distress context of social calls evokes a fear response in the bat Pipistrellus abramus

Bats primarily use sound information, including echolocation, for social communication. Bats under stressful conditions, for example when confronted by a predator, will emit aggressive social calls. The presentation of aggressive social calls, including distress calls (DCs), is known to increase heart rate (fH), but how this change in fH is related to the bat's sound perception and how this evokes behaviors such as the fear response is unknown. Herein, we show that the perception of a distress context induces freezing behavior as a fear response in bats. We found that bats responded by freezing and displayed increased fH when they were presented with a conspecific donor bat in a distress situation evoked by gentle poking with a cotton swab. In addition, when we presented two types of auditory oddball paradigms with different probabilities of DCs and echolocation calls (ECs), the bats' fH increased when DCs were presented as deviant or control stimuli within standard ECs but did not increase when DCs were presented as standard stimuli. These results suggest that the situational context created by the frequency of sound presentation, rather than simply a single sound feature, induces fH increases and freezing as fear responses in bats.

Understanding anxiety symptoms as aberrant defensive responding along the threat imminence continuum

Threat-anticipatory defensive responses have evolved to promote survival in a dynamic world. While inherently adaptive, aberrant expression of defensive responses to potential threat could manifest as pathological anxiety, which is prevalent, impairing, and associated with adverse outcomes. Extensive translational neuroscience research indicates that normative defensive responses are organized by threat imminence, such that distinct response patterns are observed in each phase of threat encounter and orchestrated by partially conserved neural circuitry. Anxiety symptoms, such as excessive and pervasive worry, physiological arousal, and avoidance behavior, may reflect aberrant expression of otherwise normative defensive responses, and therefore follow the same imminence-based organization. Here, empirical evidence linking aberrant expression of specific, imminence-dependent defensive responding to distinct anxiety symptoms is reviewed, and plausible contributing neural circuitry is highlighted. Drawing from translational and clinical research, the proposed framework informs our understanding of pathological anxiety by grounding anxiety symptoms in conserved psychobiological mechanisms. Potential implications for research and treatment are discussed.

Early threat perception is independent of later cognitive and behavioral control. A virtual reality-EEG-ECG study

Research on social threat has shown influences of various factors, such as agent characteristics, proximity, and social interaction on social threat perception. An important, yet understudied aspect of threat exposure concerns the ability to exert control over the threat and its implications for threat perception. In this study, we used a virtual reality (VR) environment showing an approaching avatar that was either angry (threatening body expression) or neutral (neutral body expression) and informed participants to stop avatars from coming closer under five levels of control success (0, 25, 50, 75, or 100%) when they felt uncomfortable. Behavioral results revealed that social threat triggered faster reactions at a greater virtual distance from the participant than the neutral avatar. Event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed that the angry avatar elicited a larger N170/vertex positive potential (VPP) and a smaller N3 than the neutral avatar. The 100% control condition elicited a larger late positive potential (LPP) than the 75% control condition. In addition, we observed enhanced theta power and accelerated heart rate for the angry avatar vs. neutral avatar, suggesting that these measures index threat perception. Our results indicate that perception of social threat takes place in early to middle cortical processing stages, and control ability is associated with cognitive evaluation in middle to late stages.

Subcortical contributions to salience network functioning during negative emotional processing

Core regions of the salience network (SN), including the anterior insula (aINS) and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), coordinate rapid adaptive changes in attentional and autonomic processes in response to negative emotional events. In doing so, the SN incorporates bottom-up signals from subcortical brain regions, such as the amygdala and periaqueductal gray (PAG). However, the precise influence of these subcortical regions is not well understood. Using ultra-high field 7-Tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging, this study investigated the bottom-up interactions of the amygdala and PAG with the SN during negative emotional salience processing. Thirty-seven healthy participants completed an emotional oddball paradigm designed to elicit a salient negative emotional response via the presentation of random, task-irrelevant negative emotional images. Negative emotional processing was associated with prominent activation in the SN, spanning the amygdala, PAG, aINS, and dACC. Consistent with previous research, analysis using dynamic causal modelling revealed an excitatory influence from the amygdala to the aINS, dACC, and PAG. In contrast, the PAG showed an inhibitory influence on amygdala, aINS and dACC activity. Our findings suggest that the amygdala may amplify the processing of negative emotional stimuli in the SN to enable upstream access to attentional resources. In comparison, the inhibitory influence of the PAG possibly reflects its involvement in modulating sympathetic-parasympathetic autonomic arousal mediated by the SN. This PAG-mediated effect may be driven by amygdala input and facilitate bottom-up processing of negative emotional stimuli. Overall, our results show that the amygdala and PAG modulate divergent functions of the SN during negative emotional processing.

Quantifying aberrant approach-avoidance conflict in psychopathology: A review of computational approaches

Making effective decisions during approach-avoidance conflict is critical in daily life. Aberrant decision-making during approach-avoidance conflict is evident in a range of psychological disorders, including anxiety, depression, trauma-related disorders, substance use disorders, and alcohol use disorders. To help clarify etiological pathways and reveal novel intervention targets, clinical research into decision-making is increasingly adopting a computational psychopathology approach. This approach uses mathematical models that can identify specific decision-making related processes that are altered in mental health disorders. In our review, we highlight foundational approach-avoidance conflict research, followed by more in-depth discussion of computational approaches that have been used to model behavior in these tasks. Specifically, we describe the computational models that have been applied to approach-avoidance conflict (e.g., drift-diffusion, active inference, and reinforcement learning models), and provide resources to guide clinical researchers who may be interested in applying computational modeling. Finally, we identify notable gaps in the current literature and potential future directions for computational approaches aimed at identifying mechanisms of approach-avoidance conflict in psychopathology.

Personality construct as a biomarker in fibromyalgia: A narrative review from an autonomic rehabilitation perspective

BACKGROUND

The heterogeneity of symptoms and ineffective treatment raise questions about the current diagnostic criteria of fibromyalgia (FM). Misdiagnosis of FM often leads to less than efficacious treatment and poor quality of life.

OBJECTIVE

This article reviews relevant evidence-based literature on personality traits in FM patients with an autonomic dysfunction perspective based on a hierarchical model to explain the utility of considering the personality trait in FM diagnosis.

METHODS

A narrative review of articles concerning chronic pain, FM, and personality traits with respect to autonomic dysfunction in FM was conducted after extensive relevant literature searches.

RESULTS

Reports discussing the predisposing factors, including coping styles, anger, suicide risk, a lack of physical activity and social support, in maintaining persistent pain in FM exist. Relationships between pain duration and severity and personality traits like neuroticism and extraversion have been reported. Coexisting clinical manifestations of FM like sleep disorders, anxiety, and intestinal irritability indicate autonomic dysfunction.

CONCLUSIONS

This article lays out a constructive framework for individualized and personalized medicine for the effective rehabilitation of FM patients. The quest to find a definitive diagnosis of FM should include personality biomarkers that might translate into personalized medicine. An individualistic approach may bank upon artificial intelligence algorithms for both diagnostic as well as prognostic purposes in FM.

Abnormal physiological responses toward sensory stimulus are related to the attention deficits in children with sluggish cognitive tempo

Previous studies have found that sluggish cognitive tempo (SCT) is often associated with difficulties in real-life functioning, such as social problems, emotional difficulties, and academic learning difficulties. However, the underlying mechanisms contributing to the SCT symptoms and its associated real-life difficulties have still not been clearly understood. A previous study has found that SCT symptoms were associated with hypoarousal and hyperarousal toward the sensory stimulus. However, it is still unclear whether such abnormal arousal regulation is related to sustained attention difficulties that have been found to be related to social difficulties and withdrawn behavior in children with SCT. In this study, arousal regulation deficit in SCT is examined by the physiological responses quantified by HRV and EEG in the sensory challenge paradigm. This study aimed to establish a linkage between arousal regulation reflected by HRV and EEG and attention difficulties in children with SCT. The results of this study showed that higher theta power in the auditory stimulation condition than in the resting condition was associated with higher omission errors in sustained attention tasks in the SCT group. It was also found that higher parasympathetic activities during sensory stimulation conditions were associated with higher commission errors in the SCT group. These results reflected that hypersensitivity toward stressful sensitivity toward a stressful sensory stimulus is associated with attention difficulties in children with SCT. This further supported the notion that SCT should be conceptualized as a condition characterized by multiple deficits in different biological systems, such as the cognitive system, the negative valence system, and the arousal regulatory system.

The gene environment aetiology of freezing and its relationship with internalizing symptoms during adolescence

BACKGROUND

The freezing response is a universal response to threat, linked to attentive immobility and action preparation. It is relevant for acute stress coping in animals and humans, and subtle deviations in toddler freezing duration (absence of, or excessively long reactions) have been linked to higher risk for internalizing symptoms in adolescence. Yet, while individual freezing tendencies are relatively stable throughout life, little is known about their gene-environment aetiology.

METHODS

We investigated the heritability of toddler freezing in the Quebec Newborn Twin Study (QNTS; n=508 twins) by fitting behavioural genetic models to video-coded freezing responses during a robot confrontation. Furthermore, we examined the predictive associations between toddler freezing and internalizing symptoms (anxiety and depressive symptoms), as they unfold during adolescence (ages 12-19 years) using linear mixed-effects models.

FINDINGS

Freezing was found to be moderately heritable (45% of the variance accounted for by genetic factors). The remaining variance was explained by unique environmental factors, including measurement error. No significant contribution of shared environmental factors was noted. Additionally, shorter freezing was associated with more internalizing symptoms in adolescence at trend level, a pattern that was significant for depressive but not anxiety symptoms.

INTERPRETATION

Freezing is an adaptive coping mechanism in early childhood, which is partly driven by genetic factors. Crucially, the absence or shorter duration of these behaviours may signal vulnerability to depressive problems later in life.

FUNDING

Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Research Fund of Quebec-Health and Society and Culture. Consolidator grant from the European Research Council (ERC_CoG-2017_772337).

Freezing revisited: coordinated autonomic and central optimization of threat coping

Animals have sophisticated mechanisms for coping with danger. Freezing is a unique state that, upon threat detection, allows evidence to be gathered, response possibilities to be previsioned and preparations to be made for worst-case fight or flight. We propose that - rather than reflecting a passive fear state - the particular somatic and cognitive characteristics of freezing help to conceal overt responses, while optimizing sensory processing and action preparation. Critical for these functions are the neurotransmitters noradrenaline and acetylcholine, which modulate neural information processing and also control the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. However, the interactions between autonomic systems and the brain during freezing, and the way in which they jointly coordinate responses, remain incompletely explored. We review the joint actions of these systems and offer a novel computational framework to describe their temporally harmonized integration. This reconceptualization of freezing has implications for its role in decision-making under threat and for psychopathology.

The functional role of cardiac activity in perception and action

SKORA, L.I., J.J.A. LIVERMORE and K. Roelofs. The functional role of cardiac activity in perception and action. NEUROSCI BIOBEHAV REV X(X) XXX-XXX, 2022. Patterns of cardiac activity continuously vary with environmental demands, accelerating or decelerating depending on circumstances. Simultaneously, cardiac cycle affects a host of higher-order processes, where systolic baroreceptor activation largely impairs processing. However, a unified functional perspective on the role of cardiac signal in perception and action has been lacking. Here, we combine the existing strands of literature and use threat-, anticipation-, and error-related cardiac deceleration to show that deceleration is an adaptive mechanism dynamically attenuating the baroreceptor signal associated with each heartbeat to minimise its impact on exteroceptive processing. This mechanism allows to enhance attention afforded to external signal and prepare an appropriate course of action. Conversely, acceleration is associated with a reduced need to attend externally, enhanced action tendencies and behavioural readjustment. This novel account demonstrates that dynamic adjustments in heart rate serve the purpose of regulating the level of precision afforded to internal versus external evidence in order to optimise perception and action. This highlights that the importance of cardiac signal in adaptive behaviour lies in its dynamic regulation.

Acute threat enhances perceptual sensitivity without affecting the decision criterion

Threatening situations ask for rapid and accurate perceptual decisions to optimize coping. Theoretical models have stated that psychophysiological states, such as bradycardia during threat-anticipatory freezing, may facilitate perception. However, it’s unclear if this occurs via enhanced bottom-up sensory processing or by relying more on prior expectations. To test this, 52 (26 female) participants completed a visual target-detection paradigm under threat-of-shock (15% reinforcement rate) with a manipulation of prior expectations. Participants judged the presence of a backward-masked grating (target presence rate 50%) after systematically manipulating their decision criterion with a rare (20%) or frequent (80%) target presence rate procedure. Threat-of-shock induced stronger heart rate deceleration compared to safe, indicative of threat-anticipatory freezing. Importantly, threat-of-shock enhanced perceptual sensitivity but we did not find evidence of an altered influence of the effect of prior expectations on current decisions. Correct target detection (hits) was furthermore accompanied by an increase in the magnitude of this heart rate deceleration compared to a missed target. While this was independent of threat-of-shock manipulation, only under threat-of-shock this increase was accompanied by more hits and increased sensitivity. Together, these findings suggest that under acute threat participants may rely more on bottom-up sensory processing versus prior expectations in perceptual decision-making. Critically, bradycardia may underlie such enhanced perceptual sensitivity.

Consciousness matters: phenomenal experience has functional value

‘Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us?’ In other words: What is consciousness good for? Here, reversing classical views, according to many of which subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage, we propose that subject-level experience—‘What it feels like’—is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value agents associate with their experiences that explains why they do certain things and avoid others. Because experiences have value and guide behaviour, consciousness has a function. Under this hypothesis of ‘phenomenal worthiness’, we argue that it is only in virtue of the fact that conscious agents ‘experience’ things and ‘care’ about those experiences that they are ‘motivated’ to act in certain ways and that they ‘prefer’ some states of affairs vs. others. Overviewing how the concept of value has been approached in decision-making, emotion research and consciousness research, we argue that phenomenal consciousness has intrinsic value and conclude that if this is indeed the case, then it must have a function. Phenomenal experience might act as a mental currency of sorts, which not only endows conscious mental states with intrinsic value but also makes it possible for conscious agents to compare vastly different experiences in a common subject-centred space—a feature that readily explains the fact that consciousness is ‘unified’. The phenomenal worthiness hypothesis, in turn, makes the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness more tractable, since it can then be reduced to a problem about function.

Fear of being near: Fear supersedes sociability when interacting amid a pandemic

In the COVID-19 era, physical interactions ubiquitously pose a disease threat. Using a novel online paradigm, this study tested whether under such unique circumstances, the fundamental motivation to avoid disease-related threats interacts with individual differences in sociability, such that: (i) responses to others are slowed down, particularly among sociable individuals, reflecting motivational tension; (ii) the role of sociability in predicting interaction likelihood is diminished. Participants (Israeli young adults, N = 207) listened to auditory descriptions of everyday social situations, taking place in either the physical or virtual space, and decided quickly whether to interact. Participants also completed the Sociability Scale (Cheek & Buss, 1981). Responses were slower in the physical compared to virtual space, regardless of sociability. The association between interaction likelihood and sociability was stronger in the virtual space, with sociability mirrored by self-reported fear of COVID-19 in predicting interaction likelihood. We propose that when physical contact with others poses a threat to safety, fear supersedes sociability in guiding behavior in physical interactions.