Emotional Reactivity and Decision-Making Under Social Deprivation: The Role of Trait Anxiety During Quarantine

Our social environment plays a critical role in shaping affective states and decision-making, a dynamic that became particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic-imposed quarantine. However, the day-to-day experience and the process of psychological recovery from social deprivation—especially among individuals with high trait anxiety—remains poorly understood. To address this, we conducted a 10-day longitudinal study involving 116 young adults returning to a university campus, collecting approximately 31,000 momentary assessments of affect and social interactions across three days of quarantine and seven days of post-quarantine recovery.We hypothesized that quarantine would restrict social interactions, leading to increased negative affect and reduced positive affect, and that these effects would be more pronounced in individuals with high trait anxiety. As expected, individuals with high trait anxiety experienced significantly greater stress, elevated negative affect, and diminished positive affect during quarantine. Surprisingly, however, quarantine was associated with increases in both positive and negative affective states across the cohort, suggesting heightened emotional reactivity during this period. Following quarantine, fluctuations in affective states declined, indicating partial emotional stabilization.To examine how affective states influenced behavior, participants also completed a virtual patch-foraging game once during quarantine and once post-quarantine. Negative affect reported within the prior 24 hours significantly influenced task performance. Specifically, participants who exhibited greater fluctuations in negative affect showed a tendency to over-harvest, consistent with decision-making under perceived environmental volatility.Together, these findings highlight the impact of social deprivation on affective dynamics as modulated by trait anxiety and demonstrate how transient emotional states shape real-world decision-making under uncertainty.