title: Trait Anxiety and Economic Risk Avoidance Are Not Necessarily Associated: Evidence from the Framing Effect.
abstract: According to previous literature, trait anxiety is related to the tendency to choose safety options during risk decision-making, that is, risk avoidance. In our opinion, anxious people's risk preference might actually reflect their hypersensitivity to emotional information. To examine this hypothesis, a decision-making task that could elicit the framing effect was employed. The framing effect indicates that risk preference could be modulated by emotional messages contained in the description (i.e., frame) of options. The behavioral results have showed the classic framing effect. In addition, individual level of trait anxiety was positively correlated with the framing effect size. However, trait anxiety was not correlated with risk-avoidance ratio in any condition. Finally, the relationship between anxiety and the framing effect remained significant after the level of depression was also taken into account. The theoretical significance and the major limitations of this study are discussed.
authors.affiliation: CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Division of Social and Engineering Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Ruolei
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Gu
authors.affiliation: School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK.
authors.forename: Runguo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Department of Behavioral Science, University of Kentucky College of Medicine Lexington, KY, USA.
authors.forename: Lucas S
authors.initials: LS
authors.lastname: Broster
authors.affiliation: Department of Behavioral Science, University of Kentucky College of Medicine Lexington, KY, USA.
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Basic Research in Clinical Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Rui
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Sichuan Research Center of Applied Psychology and Collaborative Innovation Center of Sichuan for Elderly Care and Health, Chengdu Medical College Chengdu, China.
authors.forename: Qiwei
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, College of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen UniversityShenzhen, China; Center for Emotion and Brain, Shenzhen Institute of NeuroscienceShenzhen, China; Neuroimaging Center, University Medical Center Groningen, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Pengfei
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Affective and Social Neuroscience, College of Psychology and Sociology, Shenzhen UniversityShenzhen, China; Center for Emotion and Brain, Shenzhen Institute of NeuroscienceShenzhen, China.
authors.forename: Yue-Jia
authors.initials: YJ
authors.lastname: Luo
keywords: decision-making; depression; framing effect; risk avoidance; trait anxiety