Motivational determinants of coalition formation

Coalition preferences of 300 male and female subjects were ascertained under varying motivational conditions. Two of the experimental conditions repeated the typical three-person coalition paradigm, with a monetary reward (extrinsic motivation) offered for the winning of a luck-determined game. In a third condition, skill rather than luck influenced the outcome and no monetary reward was given for winning (intrinsic motivation). Two additional conditions examined coalition preferences in a mixed-motive situation, with either a small or a large monetary reward offered for winning a skill-related game. In the extrinsic motivation condition, the low and the medium resource persons typically desired to coalesce, contrary to the wishes of the excluded, high resource player. In contrast, the coalition between the low and the medium resource persons also was preferred by the high resource player in the intrinsic motivation condition. Coalition conflict was intermediate in the mixed-motive conditions. In sum, it was demonstrated that coalition formation and interpersonal conflict are dependent upon the motivational determinants of group activity.     

Anxiety sensitivity and risk-taking behavior

High trait anxiety has been linked with risk-avoidant decision-making, though little is known regarding the specific facets of anxiety contributing to this negative association. Anxiety sensitivity (AS), a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor for anxiety-related pathology, may be particularly relevant to risk decision-making given that risk-taking behaviors generate heightened somatic arousal and produce many of the sensations feared by individuals with high AS. Two studies were conducted to investigate the relation between AS and risk decision-making. In the first study, 268 undergraduate students completed a series of questionnaires that included measures of AS and gambling behaviors. Significant negative correlations were observed between AS and several gambling-related risk-taking activities, and hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that AS scores added significant incremental validity in predicting risk-taking over and above demographic variables, negative affect, and trait anxiety. In the second study, 43 participants who had screened for high (n = 20) or low (n = 23) AS completed the Iowa gambling task, a behavioral measure of risk-taking. Results indicated that, when placed under conditions of risk, individuals with high AS engaged in significantly less risk-taking than their low AS counterparts. The implications of these findings and potential directions for future research are discussed.     

Motivational determinants of transportation into marketing narratives

This paper identifies factors that facilitate narrative transportation, where people become immersed in the storyline of an advertisement. Specifically, using a lottery context, this research shows that consumers who feel lucky or believe in personal good luck are motivated to engage in transportation, a process that is intensified as the attractiveness of the outcome increases. Further, this research shows that highly transported consumers (a) become more focused on ad outcomes and less on the low personal probability of winning, and that (b) attempts to attenuate consumers’ transportation are most efficacious if undertaken before the ad (and transportation) begins.     

Comparing personality constructs of risk-taking behavior

Canadian subjects (N = 120) completed four psychological scales. Three of the scales were directly related to risk-taking behavior. These were the Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS V; Zuckerman, 1979), the Tension Risk Adventure Inventory (TRAI; Keinan et al., 1984) and the Telic Dominance Scale (TDS; Murgatroyd et al., 1978). In addition, subjects completed the Desire for Control Scale (DCS; Burger and Cooper, 1979) to investigate the role of desire for control in risk-taking. The results indicated (1) significant differences between age and sensation seeking (2) a four-factor structure for the TRAI following factor analysis with this Canadian sample (3) numerous intra- and inter-scale relationships obtained from correlation analyses of and (4) four major dimensions arising from PCA of the four inventory scales.     

Motivational and cognitive determinants of control during conflict processing

Previous studies suggest that both reward anticipation and expected or experienced conflicts activate cognitive control. The present study investigated how these factors interact during conflict processing. In two experiments, participants performed a variant of the Stroop task, receiving performance-dependent monetary rewards in some blocks. In addition, we manipulated the level of conflict-triggered reactive and expectancy-driven proactive control: In Experiment 1, we compared the Stroop effect after previously congruent and incongruent trials to examine the conflict adaptation effect (reactive control). We found that the level of motivation did not interact with conflict adaptation. In Experiment 2, we varied the proportion of congruent and incongruent trials to manipulate conflict expectancy (proactive control). The data suggest the effects of motivation to be less pronounced under conditions of high conflict expectancy. We conclude that the interaction of motivation with cognitive determinants of control depends on whether these activate proactive or reactive control processes.     

Motivational determinants of integrating positive and negative past identities

Five studies examined whether quality of motivation (as individual differences and primed) facilitates or thwarts integration of positive and negative past identities. Specifically, more autonomously motivated participants felt closer to, and were more accepting of, both negative and positive past characteristics and central life events, whereas more control-motivated participants were closer to and more accepting of positive, but not negative, past characteristics and events. Notably, controlled motivation hindered participants' acceptance of their own negative identities but not of others' negative identities, suggesting that control-motivated individuals' rejection of negative past identities was an attempt to distance from undesirable parts of themselves. Defensive processes, reflected in nonpersonal pronouns and escape motives, mediated interaction effects, indicating that lower defense allowed fuller integration. Integration of both positive and negative past identities predicted indicators of well-being, namely, vitality, meaning, and relatedness satisfaction.     

Motivational determinants of motor performance: The hidden second task

Summary The present study was designed to test facilitating and debilitating effects of motivational processes on motor behavior. It was predicted that motivational processes have a more pronounced effect on motor performance when control is frequently transferred to attentional mechanisms (i. e., early in the acquisition phase). The results were consistent with this expectation. A strong motive to achieve success and pretreatment designed to enhance achievement motivation were associated with an increase in the quality of performance. A strong tendency to engage in state-oriented cognitive activities, by contrast, (e.g., thinking about the potential threat to one's selfesteem resulting from failure) was associated with poorer performance, It is concluded that experiments on motor behavior in which subjects are instructed to perform a single motor task may actually involve dual-task (or even multiple-task) performance if some part of the subjects' attentional capacity is used for task-irrelevant cognitive activities.     

Modeling behavior in a clinically diagnostic sequential risk-taking task

This article models the cognitive processes underlying learning and sequential choice in a risk-taking task for the purposes of understanding how they occur in this moderately complex environment and how behavior in it relates to self-reported real-world risk taking. The best stochastic model assumes that participants incorrectly treat outcome probabilities as stationary, update probabilities in a Bayesian fashion, evaluate choice policies prior to rather than during responding, and maintain constant response sensitivity. The model parameter associated with subjective value of gains correlates well with external risk taking. Both the overall approach, which can be expanded as the basic paradigm is varied, and the specific results provide direction for theories of risky choice and for understanding risk taking as a public health problem.     

Factors influencing adolescents' decisions to engage in risk-taking behavior

Few studies have assessed adolescent risk-taking from a decision-making perspective while also looking at sensation-seeking and locus of control. In this study, 171 older adolescents completed a risk-taking inventory to measure risk involvement. Sensation-seeking and locus of control, as well as perceived benefits and costs, were assessed to determine their effects on risk-taking. Results showed that perceived risks affected risk-taking more significantly than did perceived benefits. Higher sensation-seeking tendencies were affiliated with more risk-taking. Locus of control was not related to risk-taking.     

Motivational systems in adolescence: Possible implications for age differences in substance abuse and other risk-taking behaviors

Adolescence is an evolutionarily conserved developmental phase characterized by hormonal, physiological, neural and behavioral alterations evident widely across mammalian species. For instance, adolescent rats, like their human counterparts, exhibit elevations in peer-directed social interactions, risk-taking/novelty seeking and drug and alcohol use relative to adults, along with notable changes in motivational and reward-related brain regions. After reviewing these topics, the present paper discusses conditioned preference and aversion data showing adolescents to be more sensitive than adults to positive rewarding properties of various drugs and natural stimuli, while less sensitive to the aversive properties of these stimuli. Additional experiments designed to parse specific components of reward-related processing using natural rewards have yielded more mixed findings, with reports of accentuated positive hedonic sensitivity during adolescence contrasting with studies showing less positive hedonic affect and reduced incentive salience at this age. Implications of these findings for adolescent substance abuse will be discussed.     

Motivational control of impulsive behavior interacts with choice opportunities

Impulsive behavior has been investigated through choice between a smaller/immediate reinforcer and a larger/delayed reinforcer, or through performance on a differential reinforcement of low rate (DRL) schedule. In the present study, we investigated a methodological divergence between these two procedures: in the former procedure, delay is a consequence of the subject's own choice, whereas in the later procedure, subjects are explicitly reinforced for delaying a response. In Experiment 1, 7 rats maintained at 80% of their free-feeding weights showed poorer efficiency of lever-pressing responses on a DRL 30-s schedule than when they were maintained at 90% of free-feeding weight. In Experiment 2, 16 rats were subjected to a concurrent chain schedule: the initial link was concurrent fixed ratio 1 fixed ratio 1, and each of these alternatives was followed by a short-DRL requirement with a one pellet reinforcer or a long-DRL requirement with a three pellet reinforcer. In one block of trials, rats were not allowed to choose between the two terminal links (forced-choice), whereas in the other block of trials rats were allowed to choose freely between the two terminal links (free-choice). Compared with rats maintained at 95% of their free-feeding weights, rats maintained at 80% of their free-feeding weights showed poorer efficiency in the terminal links’ DRL schedule performance (just as in Experiment 1), but this difference was shown only in the forced-choice blocks. These results indicate that motivational control of DRL schedule performance interacts with type of choice-making opportunity and highlight the direct comparison of motivational control of impulsive choice and DRL schedule performance.     

Familiarity, group exposure, and risk-taking behavior in gambling

This research studied the effect of familiarity and individual versus group participation on risk-taking behavior in gambling (American roulette). Thirty-eight subjects (21 men and 17 women) were randomly selected and assigned to two experimental groups that gambled either individually or in groups. Results revealed that players bet more heavily as they became more familiar with the game, whether playing alone or in groups.     

睡眠质量对冒险行为影响的证据及解析

睡眠质量影响个体冒险行为已得到许多研究的验证和支持。睡眠缺失既影响大脑前额叶功能的完整性, 也影响杏仁核、纹状体等脑区的激活, 从而降低了个体对危险的知觉和对损失的敏感, 导致冒险意愿和冒险行为增加。已往相关研究多以成人群体为研究对象, 且忽略了个体特质与所处社会环境在睡眠质量与冒险行为关系中的交互影响。由于青少年期睡眠不足和高冒险行为普遍存在, 未来研究应对青少年睡眠质量与冒险行为的关系及其中的影响作用机制, 尤其是神经机制给予更多关注。     

The role of potential loss in the influence of affect on risk-taking behavior

In three experiments the influence of positive affect on risk-taking behavior was examined. In Experiment 1 subjects who received a free gift of candy, compared to those in a control group, were willing to pay increasingly more for lottery tickets as the prize rose from $10 to $90 and as the probability of winning rose from .10 to .90. In Experiment 2 subjects who received a free gift of candy, compared to those in a control group, were willing to pay more to buy insurance against loss, and were particularly more likely to do so when the potential loss was large. A third study, which found that subjects who received a free gift of candy were not willing to pay more for an item than were control subjects, led us to conclude that the results of the first two experiments are not best interpreted as merely due to a general increase in the willingness to spend as a consequence of having received a gift. Instead it was concluded that positive feelings can foster both risk-prone behavior (Experiment 1) and risk-averse behavior (Experiment 2). When a positive-affect subject faces a risk situation in which the potential loss is emphasized, the subject demonstrates risk aversion; when the potential loss is minimized, then risk proneness is observed.