Anxiety
Does feeling threatened help or hurt finding your way back?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Under the threat of a shock, more anxious people got better at retracing a route back to its start, while less anxious people got worse.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Instructed threat-of-shock (no shocks delivered) cued by day or night sky in a virtual urban environment; random assignment to night-threat, day-threat or no-threat groups; within-subject route repetition and route retracing tasks; trait anxiety as moderator
- N
- N=48 · 48 adults randomised to night-threat, day-threat and no-threat groups (roughly equal sizes); one participant excluded from both navigation analyses and one from route retracing for excessive errors
- Population
- Healthy adult volunteers (mostly university students) in Germany, mean age about 24
- Outcome
- Percentage of wrong turns at intersections and decision reaction times when repeating or retracing a once-seen route; ratings of valence, arousal and threat for each sky
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Key findings
Retracing a route produced more errors than repeating it. Threat had no overall effect on errors, but once trait anxiety was included, a three-way interaction emerged: in the retracing task, higher-anxious participants made fewer errors under threat than in safety, whereas lower-anxious participants made more. Higher trait anxiety correlated with a bigger benefit of threat for retracing (r about -0.45), there was no such effect for route repetition, and reaction times did not differ, ruling out a speed-accuracy trade-off.
Methodology
Forty-eight adults watched themselves being moved along short routes through a virtual neighbourhood and then either repeated each route or retraced it back to the start by choosing turns at intersections. Fake electrodes were attached, and depending on random group assignment, participants were told a night sky or a day sky signalled possible electric shocks, or that no shocks would occur; no shocks were ever given. Trait anxiety was measured with a standard questionnaire and used as a moderator.
Limitations
The sample was modest and trait anxiety was split at the median, so the crucial three-way interaction rests on small subgroups and needs replication, as the authors note. Participants were healthy adults, so the results cannot be applied directly to anxiety disorders. Route retracing is also harder than repetition, so the task difference might reflect difficulty rather than an avoidance-specific mechanism. The threat was anticipatory only, and the routes were short, simple virtual paths rather than real-world navigation.
How this study connects
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