Anxiety Modulates Preference for Immediate Rewards Among Trait-Impulsive Individuals: A Hierarchical Bayesian Analysis

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.