Dissociable effects of mood-anxiety and compulsive symptom dimensions on motivational biases in decision-making

Motivation shape our behaviour in a seemingly automatic fashion. Rewards tend to trigger behavioural activation, whereas punishment prompts response inhibition. Such motivational biases appear to embody what is globally adaptive responding in our environment, where getting a reward usually requires taking action. Still, their automatic execution can result in maladaptive behaviour when bias-incongruent responses are required, and adaptive suppression fails. As changes in motivational processes represent a core feature of many psychiatric disorders, our goal was to examine the clinical relevance of these biases.