What if your worry problem is really a planning problem? | Psyche Ideas
Article in Psyche by Paul B Sharp about whether worrying and anxiety is a misfiring planning process:
My work, which I outlined more formally in a recent paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, builds on these earlier ideas and suggests that people suffering from chronic worry engage in biased and/or excessive planning. Biased planning involves inaccuracies in the planning process, which can lead us to imagine events in unrealistic ways that are incongruent with how they actually tend to transpire. Excessive planning involves planning at unhelpful times (such as when a threat is far in the future) or beyond the point when it’s useful. If you’ve ever found yourself catastrophising about the future, or tossing and turning in bed about a challenge that’s months way, then you will be able to relate to these descriptions.
You can find the preprint of the paper online, which contains terms like state, actions, policy and other bits and pieces probably familiar to many reader!
The prospective reward comprises the weighted average over possible actions in state s (policy), the new states, s’, those actions transition to, and the values of s’. For anxious individuals, the task construal p(s’|s,a), may be biased in ways that are systematic (select worst-case task transitions) or idiosyncratic (select transitions related to childhood fears).
Sharp uses a computation approach to mental modelling. He has a new lab which covers the research projects, mainly focused on planning of all kinds.
Our lab uses diverse methods, including computational models and neuroimaging, to understand human learning and planning. We draw from reinforcement learning and bayesian models of cognition to model these processes and their breakdown in psychopathology.