Anxiety-linked expectancy bias across the adult lifespan

Abstract

Anxiety is characterised by a negative expectancy bias, such that anxious individuals report negatively distorted expectations about the future. Contrary to anxiety, ageing is characterised by a positivity effect, such that ageing is associated with a tendency to attend to and remember positive information, relative to negative information. The current study integrates these literatures to examine anxiety- and age-linked biases when thinking about the future. Participants (N=1,109) completed a procedure that involved reading valenced scenarios (positive, negative, or ambiguous) and then rating the likelihood of future valenced events occurring. Results suggest that ageing and anxiety have independent and opposing effects. Heightened anxiety was associated with a reduced expectancy for positive events, regardless of the scenarios' current emotional valence, whereas increased age was associated with an inflated expectancy for positive events, which was strongest when individuals were processing socially relevant or negative scenarios.