Are we Different? Exploring Individual Differences in Learned Avoidance

Avoidance of potential danger is crucial to an individual’s survival, but in the absence of threat, avoidance contributes to the development and maintenance of anxiety-related psychopathology. Researchers typically study avoidance of neutral stimuli by using conditioning procedures, where participants learn to emit an experimenter-defined response (e.g., pressing a button) to avoid a threatening cue (e.g., presentation of loud noise). Although such tasks can help to discover the relevant learning mechanisms, it is unclear whether they can also reveal individual differences in learning. Here, we recruited a large sample of individuals (>400) and tested the relationships between anxiety-related characteristics (i.e., trait anxiety, intolerance of uncertainty, and neuroticism) and performance in an avoidance conditioning task, where participants could avoid unpleasant cues by means of a button press. Using network and cluster analyses, we were unable to identify a strong relationship between avoidance conditioning and the individual characteristics. We discuss our findings and suggest that a paradigm shift in this experimental task is urgently needed for studying individual variations in avoidance learning.