Abstract
In real-life circumstances, people occasionally require making forced decisions when encountering unpredictable events and situations that yield socially and privately unfavorable consequences. In order to prevent future negative consequences, it is beneficial to successfully predict future decision-making behaviors based on various types of information, including behavioral traits and/or psychological states. For this prospective purpose, the present study used the Iowa Gambling Task, which simulates multiple aspects of real-life decision-making processes, such as choice preference, selection and evaluation of output feedback, and investigated how anxiety profiles predict decision-making performances under conditions with different temporal pressures on task execution. To conduct a temporally causal analysis, we assessed the trait and state anxiety profiles of 33 young participants prior to the task and analyzed their subsequent decision-making performances. We separated two disadvantageous card decks with high rewards and losses into high- and middle-risk decks, and calculated local performance indexes for decision-making immediately after salient penalty events for the high-risk deck in addition to traditional global performance indexes concerning overall trial outcomes such as final winnings and net scores. For global decision-making, higher trait anxiety predicted more risky choices solely in the self-paced condition without temporal pressure. For local decision-making, state anxiety predicted risk-taking performances differently in the self- and forced-paced conditions. In the self-paced condition, higher state anxiety predicted higher risk-avoidance. In the forced-paced condition, higher state anxiety predicted more frequent choices of the middle-risk deck. These findings suggest not only that pre-specified anxiety profiles can effectively predict future decision-making behaviors under different temporal pressures, but also newly indicate that behavioral mechanisms for moderate risk-taking under an emergent condition should be focused on to effectively prevent future unfavorable consequences when actually encountering negative events.
Highlights
People often face various unpredictable events and must decide acts in daily-life situations
Among the 10 participants who answered “5,” six self-reported using their own strategies. This suggests that the participants felt that they executed the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) while developing and controlling individual decision-making strategies
Because negative events may occur unpredictably in our daily life, the prospective approach is beneficial for minimizing unfavorable consequences by predicting decision-making behaviors when encountering events based on psychological factors, such as anxious profiles in the present research
Summary
People often face various unpredictable events and must decide acts in daily-life situations. To lead a smooth social life, it is advantageous to be able to predict future decision-making performances based on individual behavioral and psychological profiles before encountering negative events. The decision-making process instantiated in the IGT is defined as the executive function that among current lists of choice options that are perceived and/or stored in a short-term memory, people voluntarily select the best option (Bechara et al, 1998). The main characteristics of the IGT consist of the following three factors: (1) probabilistic emotional events of reward and loss, (2) information ambiguity (e.g., ratios between reward and loss) in task execution, and (3) reinforcement learning of an anticipatory decision-making strategy. As argued by Ernst et al (2002), because the IGT includes both decisionmaking per se, such as execution of selection (Paulus, 2005), and anticipation of reward and loss as an emotional feedback, it activates the dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices for executive functions such as attention (Ernst et al, 2002) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala for emotional regulation (Bechara et al, 1998, 2003; Bechara, 2004)
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