{
  "id": 9557578,
  "title": "Active Escape or Active Change? Decomposing Pavlovian Bias into Non-emotional Components",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/24/active-escape-or-active-change-decomposing-pavlovian-bias-into-non",
  "topic": "science",
  "section": "Science",
  "published": "2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "bioRxiv",
    "slug": "biorxiv",
    "url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.17.751801v1?rss=1"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Pavlovian bias, a motor bias influenced by emotionally-charged context, has traditionally been viewed as a gauge for emotion-driven behavior, potentially maladaptive in mental health conditions and suicide risk. To better understand this bias, researchers created the orthogonal valenced Go/NoGo paradigm, which has been widely used in psychiatric studies. Despite its popularity, several challenges in the paradigm suggest a need to separate confounding factors before attributing meaning to the results. By developing a new method that isolates valence, action, and transition in a group of 25 participants, scientists discovered that the active escape bias, often linked to suicide thoughts in clinical settings, also appeared in situations that were positive. Computational analysis suggested that the bias was mainly influenced by the transition structure and the cue's attractiveness, rather than by emotional value. These results suggest a need for a significant reevaluation of how we understand and apply orthogonal Go/NoGo tests in psychiatric research, especially regarding how these behaviors might relate to emotional symptoms.",
  "summary": "Pavlovian bias, a motor bias driven by emotionally-valenced context, has long been considered a proxy for emotion-action processing, which may become aberrant in affective disorders and suicidality. The orthogonal valenced Go/NoGo paradigm was developed to isolate this bias and has been widely adopted in translational psychiatry research under this interpretation. However, several unresolved…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}