Experimentally induced and real-world anxiety have no demonstrable effect on goal-directed behaviour.

BACKGROUND: Goal-directed control guides optimal decision-making and it is an important cognitive faculty that protects against developing habits. Previous studies have found some evidence of goal-directed deficits when healthy individuals are stressed, and in psychiatric conditions characterised by compulsive behaviours and anxiety. Here, we tested if goal-directed control is affected by state anxiety, which might explain the former results. METHODS: We carried out a causal test of this hypothesis in two experiments (between-subject N = 88; within-subject N = 50) that used the inhalation of hypercapnic gas (7.5% CO2) to induce an acute state of anxiety in healthy volunteers. In a third experiment (N = 1413), we used a correlational design to test if real-life anxiety-provoking events (panic attacks, stressful events) are associated with impaired goal-directed control. RESULTS: In the former two causal experiments, we induced a profoundly anxious state, both physiologically and psychologically, but this did not affect goal-directed performance. In the third, correlational, study, we found no evidence for an association between goal-directed control, panic attacks or stressful life eventsover and above variance accounted for by trait differences in compulsivity. CONCLUSIONS: In sum, three complementary experiments found no evidence that anxiety impairs goal-directed control in human subjects.Research was funded by a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award (TW Robbins 106431/Z/14/Z) and a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship (CM Gillan 101521/Z/12/Z). CM Gillan is supported by a fellowship from MQ: transforming mental health (MQ16IP13). AB Brühl was supported by a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF PASMP3-145749). FH Hezemans is supported by a Cambridge Trust Vice-Chancellor’s Award and Fitzwilliam College scholarship and was previously supported by an Erasmus scholarship. G Savulich was funded by The Wallitt Foundation and Eton College, with support from the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) Mental Health theme

What features of psychopathy might be central? A network analysis of the psychopathy checklist-revised (PCL-R) in three large samples

Despite a wealth of research, the core features of psychopathy remain hotly debated. Using network analysis, an innovative and increasingly popular statistical tool, the authors mapped the network structure of psychopathy, as operationalized by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003) in two large U.S. offender samples (nNIMH = 1559; nWisconsin = 3954), and 1 large Dutch forensic psychiatric sample (nTBS = 1937). Centrality indices were highly stable within each sample, and indicated that callousness/lack of empathy was the most central PCL-R item in the 2 U.S. samples, which aligns with classic clinical descriptions and prototypicality studies of psychopathy. The similarities across the U.S. samples offer some support regarding generalizability, but there were also striking differences between the U.S. samples and the Dutch sample, wherein the latter callousnesss/lack of empathy was also fairly central but irresponsibility and parasitic lifestyle were even more central. The findings raise the important possibility that network-structures do not only reflect the structure of the constructs under study, but also the sample from which the data derive. The results further raise the possibility of cross-cultural differences in the phenotypic structure of psychopathy, PCL-R measurement variance, or both. Network analyses may help elucidate the core characteristics of psychopathological constructs, including psychopathy, as well as provide a new tool for assessing measurement invariance across cultures