Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for September, 2016

Risk taking across the life span – self-report, behavioral, and neural patterns

The CDS team has recently published two papers dealing with the related questions ‘Do we take more or less risks as we age?’ and ‘What biological substrates may be contributing to risk-taking trajectories across the life span?’

Age–Risk Trajectories for Self-report and Behavioral Measurements

In Study 1, we analyzed self-report and behavioral measures of risk taking from a predominantly local sample of over 900 people between 18 and 90 years of age. Our results show a general pattern of decreasing risk taking with increasing age, a finding that was most pronounced for the self-report measure. However, we also identified conditions under which risk taking increases or remains comparatively stable across the life span. Our findings further suggest low convergent validity between risk-taking indices derived form self-report and different behavioral measures. One interesting aspect of our convergent validity analyses is the increasing strength of correlations between risk-taking indices derived from the same behavioral measure, specifically risk taking under different conditions within the same task. Different task conditions often represent different, even opposing underlying environmental contingencies, which in turn require flexible performance if the task is to be solved in a way that maximizes individuals’ payoff. We suggest that the stronger correlations for within-task risk-taking indices observed for older age groups could be indicative of cognitive, affective and/or motivational differences between younger and older adults, which lead to less flexible adaptation to task demands. The same mechanisms are postulated to contribute to differences in risk-taking trajectories across the life span: Cognitive task demands vary widely between different measures, which create a bottleneck on performance for older adults and consequently lead to measurement-dependent risk profiles and age-related changes therein.

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Contributory Biological Foundations of Risk-Taking Trajectories

How can we further explore and potentially explain the observed heterogeneity between risk-taking trajectories for self-report and different behavioral measures? Does the cognitive bottleneck have a neural correlate? In Study 2, we teamed up with our visiting scientist Dr. Jing Yu from Southwest University in Chongqing (China), and analyzed neural functional data obtained from a scanner study with a group of younger and older adults. Inside the scanner, participants completed the balloon analogue risk task, which represents a widely used paradigm that requires participants to pump up virtual balloons: the bigger the balloon, the higher the reward. The twist to this task is that to start with, participants do not know when balloons may explode, but only pumps that do not lead to an explosion generate rewards. Resulting from the nature and goal of the task, in order to successfully complete the task, individuals have to extract, track and integrate information about the risk, reward and potential loss associated with additional pumping. The question we intended to answer was: Does the neural representation of this task – specifically the decision to take a risk or not – differ between younger and older adults? Our findings suggest that the neural representation of task components, such as reward, risk, or loss, is not substantially different between the two age groups. Instead, functional differences in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a brain region implicated in the integration of information and computation of a value signal, were observed between younger and older adults. Our findings thus suggest that older adults do not necessarily process decision-relevant information differently, but show altered value coding.

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Taken together, these two studies confirm previous findings suggesting demand-dependent risk-taking trajectories, and extend our current knowledge about possible biological mechanisms.

Study 1: Mamerow, L., Frey, R., Mata, R. (2016). Risk taking across the life span: A Comparison of self-report and behavioral measures of risk taking. Psychology and Aging. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pag0000124

Study 2: Yu, J., Mamerow, L., Lei, X., Fang, L., & Mata, R. (2016). Altered value coding in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in healthy older adults. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 8, 210, doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2016.00210.

where did Wundt go?

I conducted a short survey of students registered for the lecture History of Psychology (N = 112). The results look very similar to those from 2015. In particular, Freud again makes it to the top of the list of best-known psychologists (students were asked to name up to 10 eminent psychologists; I show below the proportion of students that list each name that was mentioned at least twice). Sadly, not many experimental psychologists, including, Wundt, make it to this list! There’s some work to be done…

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Faculty of Business and Economics: Fall Colloquium 2016

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The Fall 2016 Colloquium schedule of the Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Basel is out! The talks are open to the public and there are a number of speakers that could be interesting to many Psychologists. To name just one: Andrew Oswald, University of Warwick, who has done a lot of work on well-being and aging (among many other things), will be visiting and presenting, Dec 5th, 2016.

50th Conference of the German Society for Psychology

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I spent the last couple of days at the 50th Conference of the German Society for Psychology (DGPs) that took place in Leipzig, Germany. The conference was well attended and covered many interesting “hot” topics, including issues of replicability and use of open methods in psychological science, social inequality, or emotion and aging.

One special treat for those at the conference was that one could sit at Wilhelm Wundt’s desk. Leipzig, of course, became known as the birthplace of experimental psychology because Wundt founded his lab there in 1879… but did you know he spent a year in Zurich right before moving to Leipzig? Wundt actually had travelled with his “psychological” instruments to/from Switzerland before his move to Leipzig – so perhaps Switzerland should lay claim to being the real birthplace of psychology!

(well, that is if we ignore the fact that Wundt had been writing and working on the same topics in Heidelberg before that…)

Wundtsdesk

Society for NeuroEconomics Annual Meeting 2016, Berlin

Die diesjährige Ausgabe der Konferenz der Society for NeuroEconomics fand vom 28.-30. August 2016 in Berlin, Deutschland, statt. Neuroeconomics ist ein Forschungsfeld an der Schnittstelle zwischen Psychologie, Ökonomie, und Neurowissenschaften. Entsprechend vielfältig waren die Themen: Von Aufmerksamkeit und Gedächtnis über soziale Einflüsse bis hin zu Konsumentenentscheidungen. Auf eher kleineren Konferenzen wie der NeuroEconomics hat man mehr Zeit sich intensiv mit den vorgestellten Postern auseinanderzusetzen, was zu zahlreichen sehr spannenden und fruchtbaren Diskussionen geführt hat. Die SWE-Abteilungen waren mit insgesamt sechs Forschenden, von denen fünf Poster vorgestellt haben, vertreten.

AUGENHÖHE (on a equal footing)

Can  concepts such as self-organisation, participatory leadership, and transparency contribute to making workers both happier and more productive? AUGENHÖHE is an independent movie that raises this question by portraying the experience of workers in companies that have implemented such concepts. All companies portrayed are “revolutionary” in their attempt to put workers and the institution/management on an equal footing. You can see the trailer below.

AUGENHÖHE – OFFICIAL TRAILER from AUGENHÖHEworks on Vimeo.

Markus Schoebel and I have been encouraging some of our students to explore similar ideas in the context of their masters’ theses on the topic of job crafting and aging. Specifically, students have and will be trying to understand how older workers’ opportunities, motivation, and ability to actively change their tasks and interactions with co-workers can produce important consequences for their well-being and, ultimately, productivity. We’re looking forward to seeing what our students will find out this semester!

Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Colloquium, Fall 2016

The Fall Semester 2016 has begun and so will our Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Colloquium (Thursdays, 13:00-14:00, Seminar Room 00.008). We will celebrate the start of the new semester with a small apéro for all students and staff on Thursday, Sept 29th, 2016, following the talk by Dirk Wulff (13:00).

Please find a list of upcoming speakers below and check any updates throughout the semester here:

Communication works for those who work at it

In September 2016 the 14th International Conference on Communication in Healthcare took place in Heidelberg, Germany. Before the main conference started, I was one of the lucky 16 who took part in the pre-conference workshop „What to Teach in Communication Skills Teaching: Skills, Structure, and How to Analyse an Observed Interaction“. Before going to Germany I wasn’t sure what to expect, as communication research is done by health-care providers, psychologists and linguists alike.

The pre-conference workshop was very helpful to get insights into the topic structure. In many role-plays and video-vignettes I was encouraged to look at human communication in a broader way than I was used to do it for my research.

After two days and many important insights from the workshop, the conference started and more than 600 people with the same interests filled the auditorium of the New University of Heidelberg.

The opening speech by Prof. Gerd Gigerenzer was the start of many interesting talks, posters and meetings: I met Swiss members of the European Association of Communication in Healthcare (EACH), I was able to meet people with similar research projects from all over the world and I was overwhelmed with the interest in our research from health-care providers and researchers alike.

Taken all together, it was a wonderful experience and I’m looking forward to future meetings, talks and experiences in this field.

Job Schepens

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We have Job Schepens, Free University Berlin, visiting CDS for 3 weeks (Sep 5-22, 2016).  Job is working on  computational modeling of age differences in decisions from experience and will be sitting in Rm 01.004 for the duration – feel free to come by and pick his brain!