Adaptive behavior can produce maladaptive anxiety due to individual differences in experience

Normal anxiety is considered an adaptive response to the possible presence of danger, but is susceptible to dysregulation. Anxiety disorders are prevalent at high frequency in contemporary human societies, yet impose substantial disability upon their sufferers. This raises a puzzle: why has evolution left us vulnerable to anxiety disorders? We develop a signal detection model in which individuals must learn how to calibrate their anxiety responses: they need to learn which cues indicate danger in the environment. We derive the optimal strategy for doing so, and find that individuals face an inevitable exploration–exploitation tradeoff between obtaining a better estimate of the level of risk on one hand, and maximizing current payoffs on the other. Because of this tradeoff, a subset of the population can become trapped in a state of self-perpetuating over-sensitivity to threatening stimuli, even when individuals learn optimally. This phenomenon arises because when individuals become too cautious, they stop sampling the environment and fail to correct their misperceptions, whereas when individuals become too careless they continue to sample the environment and soon discover their mistakes. Thus, over-sensitivity to threats becomes common whereas under-sensitivity becomes rare. We suggest that this process may be involved in the development of excessive anxiety in humans.