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Avoidance is typically adaptive given it prevents threat. However, avoidance becomes maladaptive when it is executed out of proportion of threat (i.e., excessive or insufficient avoidance), persists in the absence of threat, or excessively generalizes to other innocuous situations. Although there has been an increase in research in these different processes of maladaptive avoidance, the role of inter-individual differences in these avoidance processes receives less research attention, despite its theoretical and clinical importance. In this systematic review, we summarized the role of inter-individual traits that relate to risk or resilient factors for anxiety-related disorders, trauma-and stressor-related disorders, obsessive-compulsive related disorders, pain related disorders, eating-related disorders, and affective disorders. A majority of the inter-individual differences had an apparent mixed or null effect on the different processes of avoidance. We discussed this lack of evidence of inter-individual differences on avoidance due to a lack of methodological and/or analytical consensus in the field, in addition to a lack of integration of recent findings into existing theories. Recommendations for future research are discussed, with a focus on examining the conditions or experimental parameters for certain inter-individual traits to manifest their effects on avoidance, identifying the nuances of methodological and/or inter-individual differences in avoidance, and a call for integrating recent preliminary findings into existing theories.

Background: Anxiety and depressive disorders share common features of mood dysfunctions. This has stimulated interest in transdiagnostic dimensional research as proposed by the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) approach by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) aiming to improve the understanding of underlying disease mechanisms. The purpose of this study was to investigate the processing of RDoC domains in relation to disease severity in order to identify latent disorder-specific as well as transdiagnostic indicators of disease severity in patients with anxiety and depressive disorders. Methods: Within the German research network for mental disorders, 895 participants (n = 476 female, n = 602 anxiety disorder, n = 257 depressive disorder) were recruited for the Phenotypic, Diagnostic and Clinical Domain Assessment Network Germany (PD-CAN) and included in this cross-sectional study. We performed incremental regression models to investigate the association of four RDoC domains on disease severity in patients with affective disorders: Positive (PVS) and Negative Valance System (NVS), Cognitive Systems (CS) and Social Processes (SP). Results: The results confirmed a transdiagnostic relationship for all four domains, as we found significant main effects on disease severity within domain-specific models (PVS: β = −0.35; NVS: β = 0.39; CS: β = −0.12; SP: β = −0.32). We also found three significant interaction effects with main diagnosis showing a disease-specific association. Limitations: The cross-sectional study design prevents causal conclusions. Further limitations include possible outliers and heteroskedasticity in all regression models which we appropriately controlled for. Conclusion: Our key results show that symptom burden in anxiety and depressive disorders is associated with latent RDoC indicators in transdiagnostic and disease-specific ways.