Why Anxiety Leads To Bad Decisions

Here’s a reason to be anxious about anxiety: it can lead us to bad decisions. That’s the verdict of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, who have found that anxiety disengages a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is critical for flexible decision making. A U of Pittsburgh news release reports that Pitt researchers monitored the activity of a large number of neurons in the prefrontal cortex as rats made decisions about which choice was most optimal for receiving a reward. Then they compared behavior and neuronal activity in two groups: one group that had a placebo injection and another that got a low dose of an anxiety-inducing drug. Ready? The envelope please….As with many people who suffer from anxiety but go through day-to-day life and make decisions, the anxious rats completed the decision-making task and, actually, did not do too badly. But they made far more mistakes when the correct choice involved ignoring distracting information.