Title:

EXPERIENTIAL UNCERTAINTY: INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN AFFECTIVE AND PHYSIOLOGICAL RESPONDING

Individual differences in people’s tolerance for uncertainty are associated with mental health and well-being. However, much of the literature on responses to uncertainty has relied on retrospective self-report measures of how one believes they tend to act in uncertain contexts or has inferred how people feel about uncertainty based on their behavior in decision-making tasks. Here, across two studies, we introduce a novel experiential uncertainty task in which participants are asked to insert their hands into an opaque box and feel an unknown object. We assessed their physiological and subjective experience during an anticipatory period immediately before the start of the task. We also measured participants’ self-reported intolerance of uncertainty (IU) using a standardized questionnaire. In both Study 1 (N=149) and Study 2 (N=173), we found that individuals who self-reported higher IU also exhibited greater parasympathetic withdrawal during the experiential uncertainty task, as indexed by larger decreases in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (Study 1: β = -.20, p = .009, Study 2: β = -.36, p = .007). Individuals higher in IU also self-reported more negative emotions (e.g., worry, nervousness) in anticipation of completing the task in Study 2 (β = .36, p < .001). Findings suggest that IU is associated with heightened physiological arousal and negative emotion during even relatively mundane experiences of uncertainty, and suggest that these affective responses may contribute to the development and maintenance of IU as well as its role in mood disorder symptomology.

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