Back-translating a rodent measure of negative bias into humans: the impact of induced anxiety and unmedicated mood and anxiety disorders

Back-translating a rodent measure of negative bias into humans: the impact of induced anxiety and unmedicated mood and anxiety disorders.

Negative affective biases are a core feature in the development and maintenance of mood and anxiety disorders and a key target for treatment development. However, recent years have seen a number of promising pre-clinical interventions fail to translate into clinical efficacy in humans. One of the reasons for this is that, in some cases, the translational animal models inadequately scale-up to human symptoms. Addressing this, here we back-translate – i.e. directly adapt - a rodent measure of negative affective bias into humans, and explore its relationship with a) pathological mood and anxiety disorders and b) transient induced anxiety (study 2: within-subject threat of shock; N = 47 asymptomatic). As in prior rodent work, an adapted drift diffusion model was also fitted to reaction time data.