Anxiety Leads You To Make Bad Decisions. It's been Proven With Rats. This is a Real Study

I think many of us know we don't make the best decisions under stress. I would go as far as to say the number of us who know making decisions under stress is not a good idea, are a huge majority. I would also go as far as to say the idea of not making decisions under stress is something people have known for generations. That's not good enough for researchers. They had to do a study about how anxiety may lead to bad decision-making. They treat this as if it's an unknown revelation that could change the way mankind makes decisions. Someone needs to take these researchers aside, put their arm around them, get their attention and say “What are you doing? Studying how anxiety leads to bad decision-making is like studying why politicians tell lies, it's a given. Do you understand?”


Below are excerpts from the story in bold. My valuable insights are in italics.


Lead author Bita Moghaddam, of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, and colleagues publish their findings in The Journal of Neuroscience...Moghaddam and her team note that previous research investigating the effects of anxiety on the brain has primarily focused on the emotional response, such as how the brain cells of animal models respond to threatening situations.


You have to do research on this? I'll tell you how the brain responds to threatening situations, it says;“Get out of there” or “Now is as good a time as any to pull the trigger.” It could also say, “Drink more beer and focus on the sports you're watching, and maybe she'll quit complaining about you drinking beer and watching sports.”


They don't need to pay money to laboratory geeks who spend too much time surfing the web and playing video games. Just come to me. I'd let them know all about it at a much lower cost.

Anxiety interferes with choice-making cells in the prefrontal cortex
To reach their findings, the researchers analyzed the brain cells, or neurons, in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of two groups of rats as they completed a decision-making task, in which they had to make a decision about which choice was most logical for receiving a reward.


(Sarcasm alert) Well, this makes perfect sense. If you want to learn about people making decisions while feeling anxiety, you've got to stress out a bunch of rats. We all know rats are extreme examples of making logical choices for rewards. I'm sure the UN Security Council has a representative rat they use for advice on matters affecting the entire world.
“So, Mr. Rat, how would you keep people from cutting off the heads of other people? I know it's not as serious as using your logic to get a reward, but it is a serious issue for we people.”
“Squeak, Squeak, sniff, sniff, Squeak.”
“I see. I never thought of offering everyone a cheese party and the chance to watch the movie “Ratatouille”, but I think the idea has merit.”
“Squeak, Squeak, Squeak.”
“Yes, you can come and bring a few hundred of your friends. After all, it was your idea.”

One group of rats received a low-dose anxiety-inducing drug prior to the task, while the other group received a placebo injection.
While the anxious rats did complete the decision-making task - as would humans with anxiety - the team found that the rodents made significantly more mistakes than the non-anxious rats when the decision-making process involved ignoring distracting information to reach a logical choice.


I like this “low-dose anxiety-inducing drug.” Could this be something like caffeine? So you had two sets of rats. One set is injected with java, and the other set is injected with something that is nothing. I bet the rats injected with the caffeine didn't even get a doughnut to go with it. I like how the caffeinated rats completed decision-making tasks “as would humans with anxiety.” Huh? Were the rats tasked with driving home during a congested evening commute? Did they have to stand behind someone in a line at a store who has 4,321 items in the ten items or less lane? Do these researchers believe many people spend their days hitting a certain colored lever to get cheese? (Sarcasm alert) What will they research next? I know, how about a study concerning wives who don't like their husbands spending all day drinking beer and watching sports. I think being injected with beer would be a good change for these rats.

...gaining a better understanding of how anxiety affects decision-making could eventually lead to improved treatments for anxiety disorders and other psychiatric illnesses.


I guess injecting rats with anxiety solutions in the name of science is a good thing. Who is going to do a study about people who make their living using rats caffeinated rats for their work? Maybe these scientists are doing this research to find a cure for their own “anxiety disorders and other psychiatric illnesses.”

Overall, the team believes the findings indicate that anxiety may interfere with our ability to make good decisions by interfering with a specific set of neurons in the PFC


Wow, being paid to stress out innocent rats just leads to so many interesting things. Now, if they could teach the rats to get a job, that would be worthwhile research. The only downside is they may use these researchers for their experiments. At the very least, they'd force the researchers to watch the movies “Willard” and “Ben” over and over again.

Here is a link to the story.

Study Press Release