Computational Mechanisms of Approach-Avoidance Conflict Predictively Differentiate Between Affective and Substance...

Psychiatric disorders are highly heterogeneous and often co-morbid, posing specific challenges for effective treatment. Recently, computational modeling has emerged as a promising approach for characterizing sources of this heterogeneity, which could potentially aid in clinical differentiation. In this study, we tested whether computational mechanisms of decision-making under approach-avoidance conflict (AAC) - where behavior is expected to have both positive and negative outcomes - may have utility in this regard. We first carried out a set of pre-registered modeling analyses in a sample of 480 individuals who completed an established AAC task. These analyses aimed to replicate cross-sectional and longitudinal results from a prior dataset (N = 478) - suggesting that mechanisms of decision uncertainty (DU) and emotion conflict (EC) differentiate individuals with depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, and healthy comparisons. We then combined the prior and current datasets and employed a stacked machine learning approach to assess whether these computational measures could successfully perform out-of-sample classification between diagnostic groups. This revealed above-chance differentiation between affective and substance use disorders (balanced accuracy > 0.688), both in the presence and absence of co-morbidities. These results demonstrate the predictive utility of computational measures in characterizing distinct mechanisms of psychopathology and may point to novel treatment targets.