Posttraumatic stress and delay discounting: a meta-analytic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Delay discounting—the extent to which individuals show a preference for smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards—has been proposed as a transdiagnostic neurocognitive process across mental health conditions, but its examination in relation to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is comparatively recent. To assess the aggregated evidence for elevated delay discounting in relation to posttraumatic stress, we conducted a meta-analysis on existing empirical literature. Bibliographic searches identified 209 candidate articles, of which 13 articles with 14 independent effect sizes were eligible for meta-analysis, reflecting a combined sample size of N = 6897. Individual study designs included case-control (e.g. examination of differences in delay discounting between individuals with and without PTSD) and continuous association studies (e.g. relationship between posttraumatic stress symptom severity and delay discounting). In a combined analysis of all studies, the overall relationship was a small but statistically significant positive association between posttraumatic stress and delay discounting ( r = .135, p < .0001). The same relationship was statistically significant for continuous association studies ( r = .092, p = .027) and case-control designs ( r = .179, p < .001). Evidence of publication bias was minimal. The included studies were limited in that many did not concurrently incorporate other psychiatric conditions in the analyses, leaving the specificity of the relationship to posttraumatic stress less clear. Nonetheless, these findings are broadly consistent with previous meta-analyses of delayed reward discounting in relation to other mental health conditions and provide further evidence for the transdiagnostic utility of this construct.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".