Biais anxieux de perception des risques

Anxious people are currently attributed an estimation bias showing that they overestimate the potential dangers of their environment and they underestimate their safety potentialities. This bias can essentially be noticed in concrete and present, often anxiety-generating, situations which people have to react to with utmost urgency. We have tried to determine whether such behavior can be identified for more mature estimations where reaction time is not important and for which individuals are not more anxious than usual. For this experience, we met with eighteen anxious patients and eighteen women with no psychiatric problems. We ask them to estimate the probability that sixteen events such as “finding some money in the street” or “oversleeping” two days in a row could occur, thinking first that the events happened to other persons, then that they happened to themselves. We could classified these events according to their positive or negative consequences and according to their objective probability of rare or frequent appearances. The results show that anxiety effectively influences such cognitive operations and that this influence depends on the category of events to be judged. Thus, for example, negative events seem more probable for the most anxious young women but positive events do not appear to produce the same effects.