Do adolescents take more risks? Not when facing a novel uncertain situation

Real-life risky behavior seems to peak in adolescence, increasing the chance of negative and even irreversible outcomes, such as road traffic accidents, in this period of life. We are still lacking conclusive evidence, however, for an inverted U-shaped developmental trajectory for risk-taking. This raises the question whether adolescents are really more risk-prone or when facing a novel risky situation, they behave just as children and adults do. To answer this question, we used the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) to assess the risky decision making of 188 individuals ranging in age from 7 to 30. The BART provided useful data for characterizing multiple aspects of risk-taking under uncertainty. Participants in all age groups were able to adapt their learning processes to the probabilistic environment and improve their performance during the sequential risky choice. Surprisingly, we found that adolescents were not more inclined to take risks than children or young adults at any stage of the task. Likewise, neither negative feedback reactivity nor overall task performance distinguished adolescents from the younger and older age groups. Our findings prompt (1) methodological considerations about the validity of the BART and (2) theoretical debate on whether experience accumulation on its own may account for age-related changes in decision making both in the lab and the real world, since risk-taking in a novel and uncertain situation was invariant across developmental stages

Acute effects of alcohol on feedback processing and outcome evaluation during risky decision-making: an ERP study

Rationale: Although risky decision-making is one of the hallmarks of alcohol use disorders, relatively little is known about the acute psychopharmacological effects of alcohol on decision-making processes. Objective: The present study investigated the acute effects of alcohol on neural mechanisms underlying feedback processing and outcome evaluation during risky decision-making, using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Methods: ERPs elicited by positive and negative feedback were recorded during performance of a modified version of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task in male participants receiving either a moderate dose of alcohol (0.65 g/kg alcohol; n = 32) or a non-alcoholic placebo beverage (n = 32). Results: Overall, there was no significant difference in the mean number of pumps between the alcohol and the placebo condition. However, when analyzing over time, it was found that the alcohol group made more riskier choices at the beginning of the task than the placebo group. ERPs demonstrated that alcohol consumption did not affect early processing of negative feedback, indexed by the feedback-related negativity. By contrast, alcohol-intoxicated individuals showed significantly reduced P300 amplitudes in response to negative feedback as compared to sober controls, suggesting that more elaborate evaluation to losses was significantly diminished. Conclusions: These results suggest that alcohol consumption does not influence the ability to rapidly evaluate feedback valence, but rather the ability to assign sufficient attention to further process motivationally salient outcomes. Blunted P300 amplitudes may reflect poor integration of feedback across trials, particularly adverse ones. Consequently, alcohol may keep people from effectively predicting the probability of future gains and losses based on their reinforcement history

Puberty and risky decision-making in male adolescents

Pubertal development is a potential trigger for increases in risk-taking behaviours during adolescence. Here, we sought to investigate the relationship between puberty and neural activation during risky decision-making in males using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Forty-seven males aged 12.5-14.5 years completed an fMRI risk-taking task (BART) and reported their tendencies for risky decision-making using a self-report questionnaire. Puberty was assessed through self-reported pubertal status and salivary testosterone levels. Testosterone concentration, but not physical pubertal status, was positively correlated with self-reported risk-taking behaviour, while neither was correlated with BART performance. Across the whole sample, participants had greater activation of the bilateral nucleus accumbens and right caudate on trials when they made a successful risky decision compared to trials when they made a safe choice or when their risky decision was unsuccessful. There was a negative correlation between pubertal stage and brain activation during unsuccessful risky decision-making trials compared within unsuccessful control trials. Males at a lower stage of pubertal development showed increased activation in the left insula, right cingulate cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), right putamen and right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) relative to more pubertally mature males during trials when they chose to take a risk and the balloon popped compared to when they watched the computer make an unsuccessful risky decision. Less pubertally mature males also showed greater activation in brain regions including the dmPFC, right temporal and frontal cortices, right OFC, right hippocampus and occipital cortex in unsuccessful risky trials compared to successful risky trials. These results suggest a puberty-related shift in neural activation within key brain regions when processing outcomes of risky decisions, which may reduce their sensitivity to negative feedback, and in turn contribute to increases in adolescent risk-taking behaviours

Religiosity, financial risk taking, and reward processing: An experimental study

The present study investigated the extent to which financial risk-taking (FRT) perspectives and religiosity influenced an individual's performance on financial decision-making tasks under risk and/or uncertainty. It further investigated the potential to measure this interaction using electro-encephalogram (EEG) assessments through reward-related event-related potentials (P3 and FRN). EEG data were collected from 37 participants undergoing four decision-making tasks comprising the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), Iowa Gambling Test (IGT), Mixed-Gamble Loss-Aversion Task (MGLAT), and MGLA-Success Task (MGLAST). The present study found that BART performance may be affected by an interaction of FRT perspectives and religiosity. The physiological effects of task feedback were also distinguished between religious and non-religious individuals objectively with EEG data. Overall, while religiosity and FRT may not significantly influence IGT and MGLA performance, and interact with BART in a complex way, physiological reaction towards feedback after BART performance appears to be strongly affected by religiosity and FRT perspectives. [Abstract copyright: © 2024. The Author(s).

Catastrophizing and Risk-Taking

Background: Catastrophizing, when an individual overestimates the probability of a severe negative outcome, is related to various aspects of mental ill-health. Here, we further characterize catastrophizing by investigating the extent to which self-reported catastrophizing is associated with risk-taking, using an online behavioural task and computational modelling. Methods: We performed two online studies: a pilot study (n = 69) and a main study (n = 263). In the pilot study, participants performed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), alongside two other tasks (reported in the Supplement), and completed mental health questionnaires. Based on the findings from the pilot, we explored risk-taking in more detail in the main study using two versions of the Balloon Analogue Risk task (BART), with either a high or low cost for bursting the balloon. Results: In the main study, there was a significant negative relationship between self-report catastrophizing scores and risk-taking in the low (but not high) cost version of the BART. Computational modelling of the BART task revealed no relationship between any parameter and Catastrophizing scores in either version of the task. Conclusions: We show that increased self-reported catastrophizing may be associated with reduced behavioural measures of risk-taking, but were unable to identify a computational correlate of this effect

Neural activation during risky decision-making in youth at high risk for substance use disorders

Risky decision-making, particularly in the context of reward-seeking behavior, is strongly associated with the presence of substance use disorders (SUDs). However, there has been little research on the neural substrates underlying reward-related decision-making in drug-naïve youth who are at elevated risk for SUDs. Participants comprised 23 high-risk (HR) youth with a well-established SUD risk phenotype and 27 low-risk healthy comparison (HC) youth, aged 10-14. Participants completed the balloon analog risk task (BART), a task designed to examine risky decision-making, during functional magnetic resonance imaging. The HR group had faster reaction times, but otherwise showed no behavioral differences from the HC group. HR youth experienced greater activation when processing outcome, as the chances of balloon explosion increased, relative to HC youth, in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). As explosion probability increased, group-by-condition interactions in the ventral striatum/anterior cingulate and the anterior insula showed increasing activation in HR youth, specifically on trials when explosions occurred. Thus, atypical activation increased with increasing risk of negative outcome (i.e., balloon explosion) in a cortico-striatal network in the HR group. These findings identify candidate neurobiological markers of addiction risk in youth at high familial and phenotypic risk for SUDs

Physiological Correlates of Affective Decision-Making in Anxiety and Depression

Improving our understanding of cognitive and physiological profiles in anxiety and depression has the potential to reveal novel ways to target and improve treatments for these prevalent mental health conditions. The present study examined the impact of self-reported anxiety and depression symptoms on three established decision-making measures, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994), Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; Lejuez et al., 2002), and Game of Dice Task (GDT; Brand et al., 2005), in a diverse sample of 100 college students (age 18 to 35). Physiological measures of tonic heart rate variability and galvanic skin response were obtained to better characterize autonomic flexibility and sympathetic reactivity, respectively, during decision-making performance. Interoceptive sensitivity, measured via a heart beat perception task (Schandry, 1981), was also examined as a potential moderator in the relationship between sympathetic reactivity and decision-making. Consistent with the literature, BART performance was negatively associated with IGT performance, while GDT performance was positively associated with IGT performance. Contrary to our hypotheses, physiological measures did not distinguish individuals who reported anxiety and/or depression from those who did not. Of the three tasks, only IGT performance was associated with sympathetic reactivity. Consistent with our hypotheses, anxiety and greater sympathetic reactivity to losses in the task predicted better scores. Interoceptive sensitivity moderated the association between sympathetic reactivity and IGT performance, but only among those with anxiety, with better performance associated with a combination of lower interoceptive sensitivity and higher sympathetic reactivity. Low tonic HRV predicted worse IGT performance in depressed participants and worse GDT performance in anxious participants. These findings, though preliminary, have implications for treatment advances involving HRV biofeedback and interoceptive exposure. Our findings also highlight substantial differences between the IGT, BART, and GDT in their associations with anxiety, depression, and physiological markers, for consideration in cross study comparisons and future research

Escalating risk and the moderating effect of resistance to peer influence on the P200 and feedback-related negativity

Young people frequently socialize together in contexts that encourage risky decision making, pointing to a need for research into how susceptibility to peer influence is related to individual differences in the neural processing of decisions during sequentially escalating risk. We applied a novel analytic approach to analyze EEG activity from college-going students while they completed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), a well-established risk-taking propensity assessment. By modeling outcome-processing-related changes in the P200 and feedback-related negativity (FRN) sequentially within each BART trial as a function of pump order as an index of increasing risk, our results suggest that analyzing the BART in a progressive fashion may provide valuable new insights into the temporal neurophysiological dynamics of risk taking. Our results showed that a P200, localized to the left caudate nucleus, and an FRN, localized to the left dACC, were positively correlated with the level of risk taking and reward. Furthermore, consistent with our hypotheses, the rate of change in the FRN was higher among college students with greater self-reported resistance to peer influence

Curiosity Killed the Cat: Investigating a Link between Curiosity and Risk-Taking Propensity

Curiosity, or the drive for information and experiences that motivates exploration, plays a role in intellectual development. Curiosity is perhaps essential to education and intellectual achievement, but curiosity research is limited. Curiosity has been thought a motivation for learning and a cause of non-sanctioned behaviors and behavioral disorders. This prompts a connection with decision-making, specifically risky decision-making, perhaps with curiosity as a motivating force. In Experiment 1, college students were primed with curiosity, then participated in a lab-based behavioral measure of risk-taking, the Balloon Analogue Risk Task, and answered self-report inventories concerning risk-taking and curiosity. In Experiment 2, 4th and 5th grade students were primed with curiosity and then participated in a modified version of the BART. In both experiments, risk-taking did not vary as a function of curiosity. Limitations to the current research, and potential avenues for future investigations, are discussed