A study of individuals with generalized anxiety disorder in China found that they exhibit unusual patterns of affective inhibition and perform worse on tasks requiring affective shifting, compared to healthy individuals. These findings suggest that people with generalized anxiety disorder may have poorer emotion recognition abilities. The paper was published in Frontiers in Psychiatry.
Generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, is a mental health condition characterized by excessive and uncontrollable worry about everyday events and activities. People with GAD often expect that important events will turn out badly and worry excessively about health, work, family, or finances—even when there is little or no reason to do so. This chronic worry is difficult to control and typically persists for at least six months.
Common physical symptoms include restlessness, fatigue, muscle tension, irritability, and sleep disturbances. GAD can impair concentration and interfere with daily functioning and relationships. It belongs to a group of mental health conditions known as anxiety disorders. Estimates suggest that about 5.6% of people in China suffer from anxiety disorders, with 1.3% specifically affected by GAD.
Study author Yuqi Shen and her colleagues aimed to compare affective control abilities in individuals with GAD and healthy participants. They hypothesized that difficulties in processing emotional information might play a role in the disorder. More specifically, they expected that affective inhibition and affective shifting would be linked to self-reported mental health symptoms.
The study included 50 individuals diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and 50 healthy control participants. In each group, 14 participants were female. The average age in the GAD group was 47 years, compared to 50 years in the healthy control group.
Participants completed standardized assessments of anxiety (the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale-7 and the Hamilton Anxiety Scale), depression (the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale), affective inhibition (using the Affective Flanker Task), and affective shifting (using the Affective Flexibility Task).
Affective inhibition refers to the ability to suppress or ignore emotionally distracting information in order to stay focused on relevant tasks or goals. Affective flexibility, or shifting, refers to the ability to switch attention and responses between different emotional stimuli or tasks (such as identifying emotions versus counting people).
The results showed that individuals with GAD exhibited atypical patterns of affective inhibition. More specifically, they showed reduced proactive control—the ability to prepare and maintain focus on a task—and enhanced reactive control, which reflects a heightened response to conflicting or distracting emotional stimuli.
In other words, people with GAD had more difficulty staying focused on emotionally relevant information and were more reactive to emotional distractions. They also had greater difficulty shifting attention between different task demands, particularly when those tasks involved emotional content.
“In sum, we found evidence that patients with GAD exhibit deficits in cognitive control within affective contexts compared to healthy adults. By measuring participants in two subcomponents of affective control (affective inhibition and affective shifting), we discovered that GAD patients show poorer emotion recognition abilities and impaired affective shifting functions,” the study authors concluded.
The study sheds light on the specificities of affective functioning in individuals with generalized anxiety disorder. However, it should be noted that the design of the study does not allow any definitive cause-and-effect conclusions to be derived from the results.
The paper “Generalized anxiety disorder patients’ cognitive control in affective contexts” was authored by Yuqi Shen, Shasha Zhu, Shiqi Liao, Yuqing Zhao, Zihan Lin, Ke Jiang, Wenjing Yan, and Xinhua Shen.