SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychopathology
Delay discounting and anxiety Subtitle: a systematic review on current evidence for clinical and non-clinical population
Provisionally accepted
- 1Universidad Europea de Valencia, Valencia, Spain
- 2Universidad Europea de Madrid SLU, Madrid, Spain
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract Introduction Delay discounting (DD) is a psychological process that involves the tendency to prefer immediate rewards over delayed rewards, even if the latter are greater. The study of this process has been approached from different conceptualisations, including delay discounting, intertemporal choice and temporal discounting. The study of this construct began in the field of economics, but has subsequently been applied to various fields of psychology. There seems to be a generalized tendency among people with various pathologies to prefer immediate and smaller rewards to larger but delayed ones, although this tendency is not clear in the case of people with anxiety. Method To study the relationship between anxiety and DD, a systematic review was carried out in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, including 25 studies with a total sample of 12,728 subjects from the clinical and general population. Results The results point to a positive relationship between anxiety and DD as found in most studies in both clinical and general populations. Other studies have provided some interesting nuances on this relationship. Only two studies have found a negative relationship between DD and anxiety. Discussion and Conclusions The analysis of our review suggests a positive relationship between DD and anxiety in the general population, although this conclusion is limited by the heterogeneity of results and still cannot be generalized to other populations due to the low representativeness of the clinical population in this review.
Keywords: Delay of Gratification, Anxiety, delay discounting, temporal discounting, Systematic review
Received: 11 Jun 2025; Accepted: 06 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Rojas and Higueras. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Miguel Domínguez Rojas, migueldominguezrojas@gmail.com
Carlos Velo Higueras, carlos.velo@universidadeuropea.es
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.