Search

Contains fulltext : 222233.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Previous studies suggest that cues predicting the outcome of attentional shifts provide a measure of anticipatory alcohol-related attentional bias that is correlated with risky drinking and has high reliability. However, this is complicated by potential contributions of visual features of cues to reliability, unrelated to their predictive value. Further, little is known of the sensitivity of the bias to variations in cue-outcome mapping manipulations, limiting our theoretical and methodological knowledge: Does the bias robustly follow varying cue-outcome mappings, or are there automatic cue-related associative processes involved? The current studies aimed to address these issues. Participants performed variations of the cued Visual Probe Task (cVPT) in which cues were non-predictive; in which there were multiple cue pairs, used simultaneously and serially; and in which the cue-outcome mapping was reversed. The major findings were, first, that previously found reliability cannot be attributed to aspects of the cues not related to outcome-prediction; second, that reliability of the bias does not survive deviations from a simple, consistent cue-outcome mapping; third, that all predictive versions of the task showed a bias towards alcohol; fourth, that the bias did not simply follow awareness of the cue-outcome mapping; and finally, that only in the case of simultaneous multiple cue pairs, an association with risky drinking was replicated. The results provide support for the reliability of the anticipatory attentional bias for alcohol, suggest that relatively persistent associative processes underlie the bias in the alcohol context, and provide a foundation for future work using the cVPT. 6 p.

Concerns have been raised about the reliability of the widely-used dot-probe task. A novel variation, the cued Visual Probe Task (cVPT), uses cues that predict the locations of emotional stimuli. This appears to result in relatively reliable anticipatory attentional bias scores. However, cVPT reliability could be affected by individuals having an attentional bias \ud towards one or the other predictive cue, rather than to predicted stimuli. We provide an improved assessment of this bias. Further, trial-to-trial carryover effects, a source of within subject attentional bias variability previously found for stimulus-evoked biases, were tested. To these aims, a convenience sample of 82 participants was analysed, who performed an online procedure including a reversal of the cue mapping of the cVPT. The predicted stimulus categories were neutral and angry faces. CSIs of 400 and 1000 ms were used based on previous work. An overall anticipatory attentional bias, in terms of RT difference scores, towards threat was found. Reliability was around .4, which was similar to previous results despite the cue reversal procedure. Carryover effects were found with a similar pattern as for \ud non-cued threat-evoked bias. The results confirm a reasonably reliable outcome-focused bias towards threat, showing similar carryover effects as found for stimulus-evoked bias.

The investigation of decisions under risk has mainly followed one of two approaches.One relies on observing choices between lotteries in which economic primitives (outcome magnitudes, probabilities, and domains (i.e., gains and losses)) are varied systematically, and this information is described to participants. The systematic variation of the economic primitives allows to formally describe behavior with expectation-based models such as expected utility theory or cumulative prospect theory (CPT), arguably the most prominent descriptive theories of risky choice. One drawback, however, is that lottery tasks can seem artificial, likely reducing the external or ecological validity. A second more naturalistic approach employs dynamic paradigms that mimic features of real-life risky situations and are assumed to have higher ecological validity. Because key information are often not provided to the decision maker, it is impossible to apply the same models as in the first approach. The goal of the present work is to integrate both approaches, by developing models for the "hot" Columbia Card Task (CCT), a task that combines a dynamic decision situation with systematic trial-to-trial variation in economic primitives. In a model comparison on the basis of the data of 191 participants, we identified a best-performing model that describes behavior as a function of CPT’s main components, outcome sensitivity, probability weighting, and loss aversion. Our work therefore provides a framework that allows the description of risk-taking behavior in a naturalistic dynamic task based on key psychological constructs (e.g., loss aversion, probability weighting) that are rooted in the factorial variation of economic primitives.

All of the experiments presented in this dissertation focus on people's risk taking. In order to shed light on mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, I point out how emotions (i.e., anticipated emotions, integral emotions, anticipated regret, and emotion regulation strategies) and individuals' goal-oriented self-regulation (i.e., regulatory mode) affect risky behaviors. First – in the present dissertation – I introduce a comprehensive series of three studies (i.e., chapter 2) demonstrating whether and how individuals' regulatory modes affect individual differences in taking risky choices. I further focus on the role of anticipated regret to explain how it arises from regulatory mode, and in turn, affects risk taking. In keeping with this view, the present work sheds light on mechanisms underlying the relationships among decision-maker's regulatory mode, anticipated emotions and risk taking. Second (i.e., chapter 3), I introduce a relatively new theory studied in decision-making research (Emotion Regulation Theory; ER, Gross & John, 2003), demonstrating how ER strategies adopted from people predict risky choices occurring in deliberative processes (i.e., processes which predominantly involve anticipated emotions). But the present work does more than this. Indeed, the chapter 4 shows how situationally induced ER strategies affect risky choices occurring in decision processes related to high emotional arousal level (i.e., processes which predominantly involve integral emotion) as well as demonstrating how a personality variable (i.e., negative focus on potential outcome; see chapter 4, for more details) moderates the relationship between ER strategy and risk taking. To summarize – on the one hand – findings of the present studies shed light on emotional processes underlying human decisions under risk. On the another hand, they shed light on both regulatory mode theory and emotion regulation theory. More specifically, these findings extend our knowledge in five ways: First, they show how decision maker's self-regulatory mode (i.e., assessment and locomotion) affect people's risky choices (i.e., chapter 2). More specifically, I find that assessment mode – in comparison to locomotion mode – lead to decreased risk-taking level. It is worth nothing that, these tendencies have been shown in both habitual use and situationally induced of regulatory modes. Second, they show the trajectory of anticipated regret in making decisions under risk (i.e., chapter 2). In particular, I show that assessment mode increases the regret emotion, which in turn, decreases risk-taking level. By contrast, locomotion mode decreases the regret emotion, which in turn, increases risk-taking level. Third, they show that habitual use of emotion regulation strategies (i.e., cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) predict individual differences in taking risk under deliberative processes (i.e., chapter 3). More specifically, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression were significantly correlated with risk taking, in opposite directions: Stronger habitual use of reappraisal was associated with increased risk taking while stronger habitual use of suppression was associated with decreased risk taking. Four, they show how situationally induced emotion regulation strategies affect people's risky choices which involve higher arousal levels (e.g., when occurring integral emotions; i.e., chapter 4). In particular, situationally induced suppression ER strategy—compared to reappraisal—significantly decreases risk taking only among people with a higher negative outcome focus. Five, based on chapter 4's findings it is showed that habitual use of negative outcome focus on risky choice moderates the expressive suppression's effect in human decisions under risk. The experiments presented in the following chapters offer solid evidence of the mediating role of anticipated regret between decision-maker's regulatory modes and risky behavior. Moreover, robust evidence is showed on mechanisms underlying the relationship between ER strategies and risky decision making. Thus, we can claim that the quality of a decisional output is not only influenced by integral or anticipated emotions, but also by the effectiveness the regulatory strategies employed to control the affective states.