Visceral influences on risk-taking behavior

Personality and Individual Differences, 2000

In an HIV prevention study, 2949 ninth-grade students in 17 high schools in two Midwestern U.S. cities were administered scales measuring sensation seeking and impulsive decision-making and their separate and combined relationships to a number of indicators of sexual risk-taking. Measures of sexual risk-taking included intentions to have sex, ever had sex, number of lifetime sexual partners, been pregnant or caused a pregnancy, used a condom, used marijuana, had unwanted sex when drunk, had unwanted sex under pressure, said no to sex, used alcohol or partner used alcohol before sex. Strong associations were observed between each of the measures and sexual risk-taking for most of the indicators. Strongest associations were found among sexually active students high on both sensation seeking and impulsive decision-making and weakest associations among students low on both measures. Implications for design of interventions in health campaigns are discussed. 7

2021

We assess risks differently when they are explicitly described, compared to when we learn directly from experience, suggesting dissociable decision-making systems. Our needs, such as hunger, could globally affect our risk preferences, but do they affect described and learned risks equally? On one hand, explicit decision-making is often considered flexible and contextsensitive, and might therefore be modulated by metabolic needs. On the other hand, implicit preferences learned through reinforcement might be more strongly coupled to biological drives. To answer this, we asked participants to choose between two options with different risks, where the probabilities of monetary outcomes were either described or learned. In agreement with previous studies, rewarding contexts induced risk-aversion when risks were explicitly described, but risk-seeking when they were learned through experience. Crucially, hunger attenuated these contextual biases, but only for learned risks. The results sug...

Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 2018

The emotion disgust motivates costly behavioral strategies that mitigate against potentially larger costs associated with pathogens, sexual behavior, and moral transgressions. Because disgust thereby regulates exposure to harm, it is by definition a mechanism for calibrating decision making under risk. Understanding this illuminates two features of the demographic distribution of this emotion. First, this approach predicts and explains sex differences in disgust. Greater female disgust propensity is often reported and discussed in the literature, but, to date, conclusions have been based on informal comparisons across a small number of studies, while existing functionalist explanations are at best incomplete. We report the results of an extensive meta-analysis documenting this sex difference, arguing that key features of this pattern are best explained as one manifestation of a broad principle of the evolutionary biology of risk-taking: for a given potential benefit, males in an eff...

Judgment and decision making, 2015

The pursuit of unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking or binge drinking, not only carries various downside risks, but also provides pleasure. A parsimonious model, used in the literature to explain the decision to pursue an unhealthy activity, represents that decision as a tradeoff between risks and benefits. We build on this literature by surveying a rural population in South Africa to elicit the perceived riskiness and the perceived pleasure for various risky activities and to examine how these perceptions relate to the pursuit of four specific unhealthy behaviors: frequent smoking, problem drinking, seatbelt nonuse, and risky sex. We show that perceived pleasure is a significant predictor for three of the behaviors and that perceived riskiness is a significant predictor for two of them. We also show that the correlation between the riskiness rating and behavior is significantly different from the correlation between the pleasure rating and behavior for three of the four behaviors. ...

Personality and Individual Differences, 1995

This paper examines the relationship between risk perception, sexual risk-taking and locus of control among injecting drug users (IDUs). Locus of control was found to mediate the relationship between perception and behaviour, in that only IDUs with an internal locus of control made moderately accurate assessments of their risk. Despite this, an internal locus of control did not result in safer behaviours.

The emotion disgust motivates costly behavioral strategies that mitigate against potentially larger costs associated with pathogens, sexual behavior, and moral transgressions. Because disgust thereby regulates exposure to harm, it is by definition a mechanism for calibrating decision making under risk. Understanding this illuminates two features of the demographic distribution of this emotion. First, this approach predicts and explains sex differences in disgust. Greater female disgust propensity is often reported and discussed in the literature, but, to date, conclusions have been based on informal comparisons across a small number of studies, while existing functionalist explanations are at best incomplete. We report the results of an extensive meta-analysis documenting this sex difference, arguing that key features of this pattern are best explained as one manifestation of a broad principle of the evolutionary biology of risk-taking: for a given potential benefit, males in an effectively-polygynous mating system accept the risk of harm more willingly than do females. Second, viewing disgust as a mechanism for decision making under risk likewise predicts that individual differences in disgust propensity should correlate with individual differences in various forms of risky behavior, because situational and dispositional factors that influence valuation of opportunity and hazard are often correlated across multiple decision contexts. In two large-sample online studies, we find consistent associations between disgust and risk avoidance. We conclude that disgust and related emotions can be usefully examined through the theoretical lens of decision making under risk in light of human evolution.

Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 2006

Models of decision-making usually focus on cognitive, situational, and socio-cultural variables in accounting for human performance. However, the emotional component is rarely addressed within these models. This paper reviews evidence for the emotional aspect of decision-making and its role within a new framework of investigation, called neuroeconomics. The new approach aims to build a comprehensive theory of decision-making, through the unification of theories and methods from economics, psychology, and neuroscience. In this paper, we review these integrative research methods and their applications to issues of public health, with illustrative examples from our research on young adults' safe sex practices. This approach promises to be valuable as a comprehensively descriptive and possibly, better predictive model for construction and customization of decision support tools for health professionals and consumers.

Food Quality and Preference, 2018

Ditto et al. (1996) reported that consumers who are exposed to 1 Dear professor Prescott, Attached you will find the revised version of our manuscript; "An appetite for risk? Failure to replicate the effect of hunger cues on risk taking." (FQAP-D-17-00357) for publication consideration in Food Quality and Preference. We are thankful to have been given the opportunity to revise this manuscript. We found the reviews to be helpful and constructive and are confident that we were able to address them. We feel that the overall quality of the research report has greatly improved by (1) adding an experiment that more cleanly manipulated the presence of internal and external hunger cues and that also failed to replicate Ditto et al. (1996) and by (2) clarifying the assumptions made by prior literature. A detailed description of these improvements can be found below. To organize the revision notes, we used the same headings as the reviewer. We want to thank you and the reviewer for the insightful suggestions and we hope you find the revised manuscript interesting. We are looking forward to your response, Kind Regards, Anouk Festjens, Sabrina Bruyneel, Siegfried Dewitte. Cover Letter Highlights  Ditto et al. (1996) found that external hunger cues decrease sensitivity to risk information.  This is cited as if hunger increases risk-taking.  We test whether external versus internal hunger cues influence risk-taking.  We find no main effect of external hunger cues, but an interaction effect of both cues on risk-taking.

The Journal of Neuroscience

We thank D. Griffin, R. Gonzalez and E. Limbrick-Oldfield for consultation on data analysis.

Advances in Consumer Research, 2014