Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for December, 2020

Stefan Pfattheicher

The SWE colloquium on Thursday 17 December (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Stefan Pfattheicher, Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.

On the relation of boredom and sadism (and other cruelties)

The beauty of human goodness is clouded when we turn our focus to humans’ inclination for destructiveness. The present talk focuses on one particular type of destructiveness: sadism (i.e., harming others for pleasure). There is a substantial gap in the literature regarding the question of which (situational) conditions actually motivate sadistic tendencies. In fact, we know very little about when and why sadistic tendencies actually emerge. In this talk it is argued that boredom plays a crucial role in the emergence of sadistic tendencies. Empirical evidence is presented from (a) a personality perspective by including trait boredom and trait sadism in the analysis, (b) an applied perspective by presenting evidence from studies at public schools, in the military, on the internet (online bullying), and the private space (sadistic fantasies), and (c) experimental behavioral studies. The talk will end with a discussion of challenges in the analysis of cruel behavior.

Reading: Westgate, E. C. (2020). Why boredom is interesting. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(1), 33-40. doi: 10.1177/0963721419884309

Maria Wimber

The SWE colloquium on Thursday 10 December (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Maria Wimber, Senior Lecturer, University of Birmingham School of Psychology. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.

Memory recall as a dynamic and reconstructive process

Our memories are not static. Each attempt to recall a past event can adaptively change the underlying memory space. Here I discuss my work on the neurocognitive mechanisms that enable the selective retrieval of episodic memories. I present behavioural and electrophysiological (M/EEG) work that provides insight into how the mnemonic reconstruction process unfolds in time, on a sub-trial scale. Further, I show evidence from a series of fMRI studies in which we track the representational changes that occur in a memory trace over time and across repeated retrievals. The latter findings demonstrate that retrieval adaptively modifies memories by strengthening behaviourally relevant and weakening behaviourally irrelevant, interfering components. Together, this work sheds light onto the neural dynamics of the retrieval process, and informs theories of adaptive memory.

New paper: Using brain activation to predict risk taking

Taking risks is an adaptive aspect of human life that can promote happiness and success. However, engagement in maladaptive risk taking can have detrimental effects on individual as well as societal levels of health, wealth and criminality. One approach to understanding and, ultimately, predicting individual differences in risk taking has been to illuminate the biological substrates, specifically the neural pathways. In the past, brain activation has been associated with or even found to be predictive of risky behaviors, yet one fundamental problem of existing studies relates to the challenge of measuring risk taking: convergence between risk-taking measures is low, both at the level of behavior and brain activation. By extension, whether brain activation is merely correlated with or actually predictive of real-life risky behaviors is also likely to vary as a function of the measure used.

In our new paper, out in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, we addressed this issue by analyzing within-participant neuroimaging data for two widely used risk-taking tasks collected from the imaging subsample of the Basel–Berlin Risk Study (N = 116 young human adults). We focused on core brain regions implicated in risk taking, and examined average (that is, group-level) activation for risky versus safe choices in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task and a Monetary Gambles task. Importantly, we also examined associations between individuals’ brain activation in risk-related brain areas and various risk-related outcomes, including psychometrically derived risk preference factors. We found that, on average, risky decisions in both tasks were associated with increased activation in the nucleus accumbens, a small subcortical brain structure with a central role in the brain’s reward circuitry. However, the results from our individual differences analyses support the idea that the presence and directionality of associations between brain activation and risk taking varies as a function of the risk-taking measures used to capture individual differences.

Read the full paper here for a thorough discussion of the findings, including implications for intervention and prevention efforts, and our recommendations for future research aimed at predicting real-life behavior from brain markers.

Citation: Tisdall, L., Frey, R., Horn, A., Ostwald, D., Horvath, L., Pedroni, A., Rieskamp, J., Blankenburg, F., Hertwig, R. and Mata, R., 2020. Brain–Behavior Associations for Risk Taking Depend on the Measures Used to Capture Individual Differences. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 14, p.194.