Acute stress amplifies experienced and anticipated regret in counterfactual decision-making

Abstract

Previous research has shown that stress can affect emotion processing in a variety of settings. However, little attention has been paid to the effects of stress on emotional decision-making. The present study addressed this question by exposing healthy young participants either to a stressor (n ¼ 30)-socially evaluated cold pressor task-or a non-stressful control task (n ¼ 30). Subsequently, participants completed a computerized decision-making task in which they could compare the obtained factual outcome with a non-obtained counterfactual outcome. Saliva samples were taken at four time points over the course of the experiment and used to analyze cortisol levels. Results revealed that acute stress induced reliable salivary cortisol increase over the experimental task. At the outcome delivery stage, acute stress amplified negative emotions induced by the counterfactual comparison. At the choice stage, under stress, participants were more likely to make regret-averse decisions. The findings that acute stress amplifies both experienced and anticipated regret is consistent with dual process frameworks such that stress tilts decision-making toward more emotional and intuitive processing. LAY SUMMARYStress is thought to affect emotional processing. The present study investigated the effects of acute stress on emotional decision making using a typical counterfactual decision making task. Acute stress amplified both experience and anticipation of regret, consistent with the dual process frame that stress tilts decision-making toward more emotional and intuitive processing.

Development of the College Student Acute Stress Scale (CSASS)

“…Schoolwork, time management, financial management, relationship with friends, and social life were perceived to be most stressful using the CSASS. This is consistent with findings from previous research in which decision‐making and relationship behavior were negatively influenced by laboratory‐induced acute stressors among college students (Wemm & Wulfert, 2017; Wu et al, 2021). These findings support the validity of the CSASS, drawing similarities between the findings of laboratory‐induced acute stress and the self‐reported acute stress measure.…”

Role of Cortisol and Testosterone in Risky Decision-Making: Deciphering Male Decision-Making in the Iowa Gambling Task

“…Studies using hierarchical regression for IGT performance explain a modest proportion of IGT decision-making because IGT is a complex task with considerable heterogeneity (large standard deviations; Bowman and Turnbull, 2003;Newman et al, 2008;Singh and Khan, 2009;Singh, 2013a,b). For example, measures of emotional and cognitive intelligence explained 12% of IGT choices (adjusted R 2 = 0.12; Ramchandran et al, 2020), personality explained 10% of the IGT choices (R 2 = 0.10 for males and 0.05 for females; Hooper et al, 2008), and heart rate explained 19% of male IGT decision-making in the risk phase (Wemm and Wulfert, 2017).…”

“…Morning cortisol elevation reflects post-awakening activation response, whereas post-awakening cortisol decline reflects cortisol regulation (Adam et al, 2017). Others have employed psychosocial stress (using the Trier social stress test) for inducing cortisol elevation via social stress to examine its influences on IGT decision-making (e.g., van den Bos et al, 2009;Wemm and Wulfert, 2017). However, inducting social stress shows heterogeneous cortisol response attributed to the procedural variations in inducing social stress (Liu et al, 2017).…”

Which predicts worker’s health behavior more strongly in the COVID-19 pandemic, anticipated regret or risk perception?

“…Such unusual behavior was entirely possible because people anticipate regret [4,5] . Regret is a negative cognitive-based emotion that occurs when we consider how different our current situation might be if we had taken a different action previously [6][7][8] . Regret is a predictor of future decision making.…”