Peril, prudence and planning as risk, avoidance and worry

Abstract

Risk occupies a central role in both the theory and practice of decision-making. Although it is deeply implicated in many conditions involving dysfunctional behavior and thought, modern theoretical approaches to understanding and mitigating risk, in either one-shot or sequential settings, have yet to permeate fully the fields of neural reinforcement learning and computational psychiatry. Here we use one prominent approach, called conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), to examine optimal risk-sensitive choice and a form of optimal, risk-sensitive offline planning. We relate the former to both a justified form of the gambler’s fallacy and extremely risk-avoidant behavior resembling that observed in anxiety disorders. We relate the latter to worry and rumination.