Affective forecasting in individuals with trait anxiety: increased anticipated unpleasantness and the underlying psychological mechanism

Accumulating evidence revealed that individuals with trait anxiety demonstrated abnormal affective forecasting (AF) performance, whereas whether individuals with trait anxiety show social-specific changes in AF, and its underlying mechanism remain unknown. Our study attempted to investigate whether individuals with trait anxiety show social-specific alterations when forecasting future emotions, and further explore the underlying psychological mechanism. A total of 130 participants were recruited into high trait anxiety (HTA) group (n = 65) or low trait anxiety (LTA) group (n = 65) based on their scores on the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-Trait (STAI-T) and Beck Depression Inventory-I (BDI-I). Participants answered online questionnaires first and then visited our lab to complete the Social Affective Forecasting task. Data collection lasted from March 2021 to May 2022. This study was a 2 (events: social vs. nonsocial) × 2 (group: HTA vs. LTA) mixed design. Compared with LTA, HTA group would anticipate more unpleasantness (e.g., lower valence) for future negative social events. Meanwhile, HTA group anticipated more unpleasantness for future negative social events than non-social events. Moreover, the anticipated valence was predicted by the anticipatory valence. No significant difference was observed in anticipating positive future events. These findings suggest that HTA individuals tend to anticipate increased unpleasantness for negative social events. Moreover, abnormal anticipatory emotion may contribute to the increased anticipated unpleasantness. Anticipatory emotions may be potential intervention targets for reducing anticipated unpleasantness.