Lower, not higher, trait anxiety leads to switch cost asymmetry on neutral tasks: a replication and extension of Gustavson et al., 2017

When experimental tasks require intermittent switching between easy and hard trials, people exhibit switch cost asymmetry. This is a tendency to be slower to switch over from a hard task to an easier task than vice versa. Previously, Gustavson and colleagues (2007) found that people higher on trait-anxiety exhibit a stronger switch cost asymmetry. We replicated this task, which was emotionally neutral, in an online experiment with a larger number of participants (N=212 vs. original N = 91), and extended the findings to an affective version of the same task. We found evidence of switch cost asymmetry in both experiments, with only the emotionally neutral one showing a relation to trait anxiety as well as depression. As opposed to the original study, we found that people lower, not higher, on anxiety were driving the effect, by being slower to disengage from the hard trials regardless of whether they needed to switch tasks or not on the following trial. We interpret these results in the context of the effects of anxiety and depression on allostasis, with direct consequences on available energy levels for task performance.