Michelle Dawson posts
Structured cited links
Andrew D. R. Surtees, Henry Briscoe, Andrew R. Todd (2024). Anxiety and Mentalizing: Uncertainty as a Driver of Egocentrism. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 33(2), 100-107. SAGE Publications.
Abstract
Emotions shape how people understand and interact with others. Here, we review evidence on the relationship between anxiety—a future-oriented emotion characterized by negative valence, high arousal, and uncertainty—and mentalizing—the ascription of mental content to other agents. We examine three aspects of this relationship: how people with anxiety disorders perform on mentalizing tasks relative to controls; how situational anxiety alters mentalizing performance; and how autistic people, who experience the impacts of mentalizing differences, are at high risk of anxiety. We propose a bidirectional model for understanding how short-term and longer term anxiety are related to mentalizing. Key to this relationship is the aversive experience of uncertainty and the motivations that result from it.
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