Pre-specified Anxiety Predicts Future Decision-Making Performances Under Different Temporally Constrained Conditions

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Takahiro Soshi¹  Mitsue Nagamine²  Emiko Fukuda³  Ai Takeuchi⁴ 

[1] Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University;Institute for Liberal Arts, Tokyo Institute of Technology;Department of Industrial Engineering and Economics, School of Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology;College of Economics, Ritsumeikan University

关键词: decision-making;    Iowa Gambling Task;    anxiety;    temporal pressure;    prospective approach;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01544

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY