Towards an emotional ‘stress test’: a reliable, non-subjective cognitive measure of anxious responding

Response to stress or external threats is a key factor in mood and anxiety disorder aetiology. Current measures of anxious responding to threats are limited because they largely rely on retrospective self-report. Objectively quantifying individual differences in threat response would be a valuable step towards improving our understanding of anxiety disorder vulnerability. Our goal is to therefore develop a reliable, objective, within-subject ‘stress-test’ of anxious responding. To this end, we examined threat-potentiated performance on an inhibitory control task from baseline to 2–4 weeks (n = 50) and again after 5–9 months (n = 22). We also describe single session data for a larger sample (n = 157) to provide better population-level estimates of task performance variance. Replicating previous findings, threat of shock improved distractor accuracy and slowed target reaction time on our task. Critically, both within-subject self-report measures of anxiety (ICC = 0.66) and threat-potentiated task performance (ICC = 0.58) showed clinically useful test-retest reliability. Threat-potentiated task performance may therefore hold promise as a non-subjective measure of individual anxious responding.