Trait impulsivity—defined by strong preference for immediate over delayed rewards and difficulties inhibiting prepotent behaviors—is observed in all externalizing disorders, including substance-use disorders. Many laboratory tasks have been developed to identify decision-making mechanisms and correlates of impulsive behavior, but convergence between task measures and self-reports of impulsivity are consistently low. Long-standing theories of personality and decision-making predict that neurally mediated individual differences in sensitivity to (a) reward cues and (b) punishment cues (frustrative nonreward) interact to affect behavior. Such interactions obscure one-to-one correspondences between single personality traits and task performance. We used hierarchical Bayesian analysis in three samples with differing levels of substance use (N = 967) to identify interactive dependencies between trait impulsivity and state anxiety on impulsive decision-making. Our findings reveal how anxiety modulates impulsive decision-making and demonstrate benefits of hierarchical Bayesian analysis over traditional approaches for testing theories of psychopathology spanning levels of analysis.

中文翻译：

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焦虑调节特质冲动个体对即时奖励的偏好：分层贝叶斯分析

在所有外化障碍（包括物质使用障碍）中都观察到了特质冲动 - 由对立即奖励和延迟奖励的强烈偏好和抑制优势行为的困难定义。已经开发了许多实验室任务来确定决策机制和冲动行为的相关性，但任务测量和冲动自我报告之间的收敛性一直很低。长期存在的人格和决策理论预测，神经介导的个体差异对（a）奖励线索和（b）惩罚线索（令人沮丧的非奖励）的敏感性相互作用以影响行为。这种相互作用掩盖了单一人格特征和任务绩效之间的一一对应关系。我们在三个具有不同物质使用水平（N = 967）的样本中使用分层贝叶斯分析来确定特质冲动和冲动决策状态焦虑之间的交互依赖关系。我们的研究结果揭示了焦虑如何调节冲动决策，并证明了分层贝叶斯分析相对于测试跨越分析水平的精神病理学理论的传统方法的好处。