Beyond passivity: Depressive symptoms predict persistent active avoidance under ambiguity

Avoidance behaviors can involve either initiating or suppressing actions to prevent harm. While avoidance generalization has been extensively studied in anxiety, its expression in depression remains poorly understood—particularly when active and inhibitory strategies compete under conditions of ambiguity without corrective feedback. To test whether depressive symptoms are associated with behavioral passivity or persistent strategy expression, we developed a novel instrumental avoidance generalization task. Undergraduates (N = 292) with a wide range of depressive symptoms (BDI-II; minimal--severe) learned discriminative cues signaling either active (rapid button pressing) or inhibitory (withholding) responses to prevent aversive sounds. After strategies were well established, graded ambiguous cues varying in similarity to trained signals were introduced without differential feedback (all probe trials resulted in safety). Depressive symptoms were not associated with impaired avoidance acquisition or altered similarity gradients. Instead, higher symptoms were associated with greater active avoidance accuracy once contingencies were established and an increased likelihood of selecting the active strategy under ambiguity—even for cues perceptually closer to trained inhibitory exemplars. In this task context, these findings do not support accounts of depression as uniformly characterized by motivational disengagement. Rather, they suggest that depressive symptoms are associated with persistent expression of previously reinforced avoidance strategies when discriminative information is reduced. By isolating strategy selection under ambiguity independently of new learning, this paradigm provides a structured behavioral framework for examining how task context shapes avoidance behavior across depressive symptom levels and may help clarify how avoidance persists in real-world situations where feedback does not clearly indicate whether specific avoidance actions influenced outcomes.