Anxiety modulates event segmentation

Anxiety is one of the most prevalent mental health concerns. Current theories suggest that anxiety may arise due to deficits in segmentation of continuous experience into discrete context representations (‘event segmentation’), which leads to overgeneralization of fear across contexts, or conversely, overly rigid segmentation that prevents safety learning. Here, in two segmentation tasks (N=1109), we found novel and direct evidence that anxiety is associated with changes in event segmentation. Individuals with higher anxiety symptoms responded more slowly to transitions between events (event boundaries). They also segmented movies into discrete events more typically and more hierarchically, two hallmarks of precise segmentation. This precision was linked to self-reporting fewer context changes in daily life, suggesting individuals with anxiety prefer stable and predictable environments. These findings challenge overgeneralization theories of anxiety, revealing instead that individuals with anxiety exhibit precise, and potentially overly rigid segmentation. Such segmentation could maintain fear by preventing generalization from safe to fearful contexts, which has important implications for interventions like exposure therapy.