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Social Stress Facilitates Risk in Youths
Jeremy Jamieson & Wendy Berry Mendes
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, April 2016, Pages 467-485
Abstract:
This research examined the influence of social stress on risk processes in youths. Study 1 (N = 89) randomly assigned male youths to perform either a stressful social-evaluative or nonstressful control task followed by a risk-perception measure. Compared to controls, social stress participants perceived less risk in their environment. Study 2 (N = 188) extended findings by testing effects of social stress on risk perception in males and females, and across 3 age groups: teenagers (15–19), young adults (25–40), and older adults (60–75). Replicating Study 1, teenagers experiencing social stress perceived less risk than age-matched controls. However, adults assigned to experience social stress reported greater risk perception compared to their age-matched controls. Effects of social stress also extended to risk-taking behavior. Stressed teenagers engaged in more risk-taking behavior relative to controls, and showed increased reward and lowered cost sensitivity during decision-making. These findings offer basic and translational value regarding factors that influence how youths evaluate risk.
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Laughing at Risk: Sitcom Laugh Tracks Communicate Norms for Behavior
Nancy Rhodes & Morgan Ellithorpe
Media Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The role that sitcom laugh tracks play in the communication of social norms was investigated. Participants (n = 112) were exposed to a sitcom narrative in which reckless driving behaviors were exhibited, or a control narrative. One half of the participants viewed a clip with laugh track present, and the other half viewed a clip with the laugh track edited out. Results indicate that laugh tracks do communicate information about what kinds of driving behavior is normative in the target driving clip condition. Specifically, the accessibility of risky driving injunctive norms was influenced by the laugh track and scenario manipulation. This effect was moderated by identification with the character who exhibited reckless behavior. Accessibility of risky driving norms then predicted attitudes, descriptive norms, and behavioral intentions regarding risky driving. The implication of the results is that media narratives can communicate norms for behavior through the laugh track in a sitcom.
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When Is an Adolescent an Adult? Assessing Cognitive Control in Emotional and Nonemotional Contexts
Alexandra Cohen et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
An individual is typically considered an adult at age 18, although the age of adulthood varies for different legal and social policies. A key question is how cognitive capacities relevant to these policies change with development. The current study used an emotional go/no-go paradigm and functional neuroimaging to assess cognitive control under sustained states of negative and positive arousal in a community sample of one hundred ten 13- to 25-year-olds from New York City and Los Angeles. The results showed diminished cognitive performance under brief and prolonged negative emotional arousal in 18- to 21-year-olds relative to adults over 21. This reduction in performance was paralleled by decreased activity in fronto-parietal circuitry, implicated in cognitive control, and increased sustained activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, involved in emotional processes. The findings suggest a developmental shift in cognitive capacity in emotional situations that coincides with dynamic changes in prefrontal circuitry. These findings may inform age-related social policies.
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Did households’ time preference change due to the Great Recession?
Eunice Hong & Sherman Hanna
Applied Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
Household time preference for US households, as measured by the planning horizon, was fairly stable for many years, but sharply changed with the onset of the Great Recession. Based on an analysis of a combination of the 1992–2013 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) datasets, time preference increased in 2010 and remained high in 2013, indicating households were less patient after the onset of the recession. This pattern held up even after controlling for household characteristics.
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Psychopathy and Machiavellianism: A distinction without a difference?
Joshua Miller et al.
Journal of Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
A robust literature has emerged on the Dark Triad (DT) of personality – Machiavellianism (MACH), psychopathy, and narcissism. Questions remain as to whether MACH and psychopathy are distinguishable and whether MACH's empirical and theoretical networks are consistent. In Study 1 (N = 393), factor analyses were used to compare 2 (MACH and psychopathy combined + narcissism) and 3 factor models with both fitting the data equally well. In Studies 1 and 2 (N = 341), DT scores were examined in relation to a variety of external criteria including self and informant ratings of personality, adverse developmental experiences, and psychopathological symptoms/behaviors. In both studies, MACH and psychopathy manifested nearly identical empirical profiles and both were significantly related to disinhibitory traits thought to be antithetical to MACH. In Study 3 (N = 36), expert ratings of the FFM traits prototypical of MACH were collected and compared with empirically derived profiles. Measures of MACH yielded profiles that were inconsistent with the prototypical expert-rated profile due to their positive relations with a broad spectrum of impulsivity-related traits. Ultimately, measures of psychopathy and MACH appear to be measuring the same construct and MACH assessments fail to capture the construct as articulated in theoretical descriptions.
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Susanne Schweizer et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, February 2016, Pages 272-281
Abstract:
Individuals exposed to childhood adversities (CA) present with emotion regulation (ER) difficulties in later life, which have been identified as risk and maintenance factors for psychopathologies. However, it is unclear if CA negatively impacts on ER capacity per se or whether observed regulation difficulties are a function of the challenging circumstances in which ER is being deployed. In this longitudinal study, we aimed to clarify this association by investigating the behavioral and neural effects of exposure to common moderate CA (mCA) on a laboratory measure of ER capacity in late adolescence/young adulthood. Our population-derived samples of adolescents/young adults (N = 53) were administered a film-based ER-task during functional magnetic resonance imaging that allowed evaluation of ER across mCA-exposure. mCA-exposure was associated with enhanced ER capacity over both positive and negative affect. At the neural level, the better ER of negative material in those exposed to mCA was associated with reduced recruitment of ER-related brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex and temporal gyrus. In addition mCA-exposure was associated with a greater down-regulation of the amygdala during ER of negative material. The implications of these findings for our understanding of the effects of mCA on the emergence of resilience in adolescence are discussed.
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Emotional Arousal Predicts Intertemporal Choice
Karolina Lempert, Eli Johnson & Elizabeth Phelps
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
People generally prefer immediate rewards to rewards received after a delay, often even when the delayed reward is larger. This phenomenon is known as temporal discounting. It has been suggested that preferences for immediate rewards may be due to their being more concrete than delayed rewards. This concreteness may evoke an enhanced emotional response. Indeed, manipulating the representation of a future reward to make it more concrete has been shown to heighten the reward’s subjective emotional intensity, making people more likely to choose it. Here the authors use an objective measure of arousal — pupil dilation — to investigate if emotional arousal mediates the influence of delayed reward concreteness on choice. They recorded pupil dilation responses while participants made choices between immediate and delayed rewards. They manipulated concreteness through time interval framing: delayed rewards were presented either with the date on which they would be received (e.g., “$30, May 3”; DATE condition, more concrete) or in terms of delay to receipt (e.g., “$30, 7 days; DAYS condition, less concrete). Contrary to prior work, participants were not overall more patient in the DATE condition. However, there was individual variability in response to time framing, and this variability was predicted by differences in pupil dilation between conditions. Emotional arousal increased as the subjective value of delayed rewards increased, and predicted choice of the delayed reward on each trial. This study advances our understanding of the role of emotion in temporal discounting.
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Joel Myerson, Ana Baumann & Leonard Green
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research on delay discounting and inter-temporal choice has yielded significant insights into decision making. Although research has focused on delayed gains, the discounting of losses is potentially important in precisely those areas where the discounting of gains has proved informative (e.g., substance use and abuse). Participants in the current study completed both a questionnaire consisting of choices between immediate and delayed gains and an analogous questionnaire consisting of choices between immediate and delayed losses. For almost all participants, the likelihood of choosing the delayed gain decreased with increases in the wait until it would be received. In contrast, when losses (i.e., payments) were involved, different participants showed quite different patterns of choices. More specifically, although the majority of the participants became increasingly likely to choose to pay later as the delay was increased, some participants appeared to be debt averse, in that they were more likely to choose the immediate payment option when the delay was long than when it was brief. These debt-averse participants also were more likely to choose to wait for a larger delayed gain than other participants and scored lower on Impulsiveness than those who showed the typical pattern of discounting delayed losses. Taken together, these results suggest that in the case of delayed gains, people differ only quantitatively (i.e., in how steeply they discount), whereas in the case of delayed losses, people differ qualitatively as well as quantitatively, contrary to the common assumption that a single impulsivity trait underlies choices between immediate and delayed outcomes.
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Exposure to acute stress enhances decision-making competence: Evidence for the role of DHEA
Grant Shields et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, May 2016, Pages 51–60
Abstract:
Exposure to acute stress can impact performance on numerous cognitive abilities, but little is known about how acute stress affects real-world decision-making ability. In the present study, we induced acute stress with a standard laboratory task involving uncontrollable socio-evaluative stress and subsequently assessed decision-making ability using the Adult Decision Making Competence index. In addition, we took baseline and post-test saliva samples from participants to examine associations between decision-making competence and adrenal hormones. Participants in the stress induction group showed enhanced decision-making competence, relative to controls. Further, although both cortisol and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) reactivity predicted decision-making competence when considered in isolation, DHEA was a significantly better predictor than cortisol when both hormones were considered simultaneously. Thus, our results show that exposure to acute stress can have beneficial effects on the cognitive ability underpinning real-world decision-making and that this effect relates to DHEA reactivity more than cortisol.