Back-translating a rodent measure of negative bias into humans: the impact of induced anxiety and unmedicated mood and anxiety disorders

Negative affective biases are a core feature in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders and, as such, are a key target for treatment development. However, recent years have seen a number of promising treatments fail to translate from animal models into clinical efficacy in humans. Better translational pipelines for treatment development are therefore needed. Directly adapting – i.e. back-translating –animal paradigms into humans is a promising, albeit less frequently adopted, approach. Here, we back-translate a rodent model of negative affective bias into humans, and explore the influence of a) pathological mood and anxiety disorders (study 1: N=30 symptomatic; N=47 controls) and b) transient induced anxiety (study 2: within-subject threat of shock; N = 47) on task performance. As in prior rodent work, an adapted drift diffusion model was also fitted to reaction time data to shed further light on decision-making processes.