Intolerance Of Uncertainty’s Influence On Fear Generalization

Intolerance of uncertainty is a transdiagnostic dispositional risk factor for anxiety disorders.Intolerance of uncertainty affects how a person perceives,interprets,and responds to uncertain situations.Previous studies mainly focused on the association between intolerance of uncertainty and other cognitive risk factors of anxiety disorder,as well as the effect of intolerance of uncertainty on singular level.There is a lack of research on the role of intolerance of uncertainty in the development and maintaining process of anxiety disorder.Given that fear generalization is the core feature of anxiety disorder,it is important to study its relationship with intolerance of uncertainty.This research,with three studies,aims to examine whether and how intolerance of uncertainty may predict fear generalization in predictable and unpredictable contexts.The first study examined fear generalization in similar contexts.The results showed that high intolerance of uncertainty was associated with greater contextual fear generalization which was modulated by contexts.Moreover,significant difference between contexts was found for high intolerance of uncertainty group where threat expectancy was heightened in the unpredictable context,indicating that individuals with high intolerance of uncertainty were more sensitive to unpredictability.In addition,the unpredictable context elicited heightened fear response relative to the predictable context.The second study explored the fear generalization in similar stimuli and its underlying neural mechanism.The results revealed that individuals with high intolerance of uncertainty showed greater cued fear generalization in the unpredictable context relative to the predictable context;however,such difference was not observed for individuals with low intolerance of uncertainty.The ERP results showed that after stimulus discrimination(N1),individuals with high intolerance of uncertainty had different attention allocation(P2),inhibition(N2)and anticipation process(CNV)relative to individuals with low intolerance of uncertainty.The third study explored the fear generalization using avoidance choice as an additional dependent variable.The results showed that individuals with high intolerance of uncertainty behaved greater cued fear generalization and higher avoid percentage ratio across contexts than individuals with low intolerance of uncertainty.Group difference is more evident in the unpredictable context than in the predictable context.The ERP results showed that after stimulus discrimination(N1),individuals with high intolerance of uncertainty showed attention bias toward negative and unpredictable stimulus(P2),incapacity of inhibition(N2),and biased emotion regulation process(LPP)relative to individuals with low intolerance of uncertainty.In conclusion,our study showed that(1)intolerance of uncertainty affects multiple forms of fear generalization and is associated with greater fear generalization;(2)the unpredictable context elicited heightened fear responses and more avoidance behaviors;(3)individuals with high intolerance of uncertainty showed significantly different behavioral and neural response patterns between the unpredictable and the predictable contexts,indicating their higher sensitivity to threat uncertainty.These findings enhance the understanding of the role of intolerance of uncertainty in anxiety disorders,and provides supporting evidence for cognitive behavior therapies targeting uncertainty.