Anxiety and Depression Related Abnormalities in Socio-affective Learning

High anxiety may be related insufficient sensitivity to changing reinforcement during operant learning. Whether such findings are specific to anxiety is unclear given a wider literature relating negative affect to abnormal learning and the possibility that relationships are not consistent across incentive types (i.e. punishment and reward) and outcomes (i.e., positive or negative). In two separate samples ( = 76; = 49), participants completed an operant learning task with positive, negative, and neutral socio-affective feedback, designed to assess adaptive responses to changing environmental volatility. Contrary to expectations, general affective distress, rather than anxiety or depression specifically, was related to an increase, rather than a decrease, in the rate of learning for negative outcomes in volatile, relative to stable, environments. Our results suggest an important but general role in anxiety and depression of overweighting negative feedback when the value of an action becomes uncertain, as when environmental volatility increases.