Stress and decision making: the role of impulsive personality

Abstract

Stress, gender, and impulsive personality traits are each associated with altered decision making, but no studies have yet examined interactions between all of these factors. Impulsive personality can be parsed into five subtypes, consisting of Negative Urgency, the tendency to act rashly in the face of extreme negative emotion; Positive Urgency, the tendency to act rashly in the face of strong positive emotion; Lack of Premeditation, the tendency to insufficiently consider actions prior to their implementation; Lack of Perseverance, the tendency to not complete tasks; and Sensation Seeking, the tendency to seek out novel or exciting stimuli. To assess interactions between acute social stress, impulsivity styles, and decision making, we exposed 78 young (aged 18-27) men and women to a social stress or a non-stress condition, and then administered three decision making tasks; The Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Game of Dice Task (GDT). We found that stress effects on decision making differed as a function of both gender and impulsivity traits on each of these tasks. Specifically, during stress, women low in Negative Urgency and men high in Negative Urgency made fewer risky decisions on the BART. Positive Urgency yielded a similar pattern. Furthermore, during stress, women high in Sensation Seeking made more advantageous decisions in the ambiguous phase of the IGT, whereas men high in Sensation Seeking made fewer advantageous decisions in this phase. Finally, riskier decisions on the GDT were associated with Lack of Perseverance, an effect that tended to be more prominent in the stress condition, particularly in men. Decisions of varying levels of uncertainty, risk and ambiguity may thus depend on a complex interplay between the experience of stress, gender, and impulsive personality traits. These findings are relevant to clinical assessment and intervention for impulsivity-related disorders, such as Borderline Personality Disorder or substance-use disorders, in which there are deficits in decision making and higher levels of trait impulsivity are both prominent.