Abstract
Negative affective biases are a core feature in the development and maintenance of mood and anxiety disorders and a key target for treatment development. However, recent years have seen a number of promising pre-clinical interventions fail to translate into clinical efficacy in humans. One reason for this is that, in some cases, the animal models inadequately scale-up to human symptoms. To address this, here we directly adapt– i.e. back-translate - a rodent measure of negative affective bias into humans, and explore its relationship with a) pathological mood and anxiety disorders (study 1: N=77; 30 symptomatic) and b) transient induced anxiety (study 2: within-subject threat of shock; N=47 asymptomatic). As in prior rodent work, an adapted drift diffusion model was also fitted to reaction time data. In study 1, pathological anxiety was associated with a negative bias in choice behaviour alongside a reduced drift rate towards the positive choice in drift diffusion analysis. In study 2 there was no significant effect of induced anxiety on any measure. The pathological anxiety findings directly mimic rodents undergoing anxiogenic manipulations, whilst the lack of sensitivity to transient anxiety suggests the paradigm may be more sensitive to clinically relevant symptoms. Our results therefore establish a direct translational pipeline from negative affective bias in rodents to pathological mood and anxiety symptoms in humans.