title: Vigour in active avoidance.
abstract: It would be maladaptive to learn about catastrophes by trial and error alone. Investment in planning and effort are necessary. Devoting too many resources to averting disaster, however, can impair quality of life, as in anxiety and paranoia. Here, we developed a novel task to explore how people adjust effort expenditure (vigor) so as to avoid negative consequences. Our novel paradigm is immersive, enabling us to measure vigor in the context of (simulated) disaster. We found that participants (N = 118) exerted effort to avoid disaster-associated states, adjusting their effort expenditure according to the baseline probability of catastrophe, in agreement with theoretical predictions. Furthermore, negative subjective emotional states were associated both with threat level and with increasing vigor in the face of disaster. We describe for the first time effort expenditure in the context of irreversible losses, with important implications for disorders marked by excessive avoidance.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK. camilla.nord.11@ucl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Camilla L
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Nord
authors.affiliation: Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL, 12 Queen Square, London, UK.
authors.forename: Gita
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Prabhu
authors.affiliation: Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL, 12 Queen Square, London, UK.|Anna Freud Centre, London, UK.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nolte
authors.affiliation: Anna Freud Centre, London, UK.|Research Department of Clinical, Educational, and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-0229-0091
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fonagy
authors.affiliation: Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL, 12 Queen Square, London, UK.|Max Plank UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, London, UK.
authors.forename: Ray
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Dolan
authors.affiliation: Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL, 12 Queen Square, London, UK.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Moutoussis
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001362:Avoidance Learning; D004190:Disasters; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D018737:Hand Strength / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011336:Probability; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D000066908:Simulation Training; D006113:United Kingdom