Neurobiological Substrates of Dread

Abstract

Given the choice of waiting for an adverse outcome or getting it over with quickly, many people choose the latter. Theoretical models of decision-making have assumed that this occurs because there is a cost to waiting-i.e., dread. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured the neural responses to waiting for a cutaneous electric shock. Some individuals dreaded the outcome so much that, when given a choice, they preferred to receive more voltage rather than wait. Even when no decision was required, these extreme dreaders were distinguishable from those who dreaded mildly by the rate of increase of neural activity in the posterior elements of the cortical pain matrix. This suggests that dread derives, in part, from the attention devoted to the expected physical response and not simply from fear or anxiety. Although these differences were observed during a passive waiting procedure, they correlated with individual behavior in a subsequent choice paradigm, providing evidence for a neurobiological link between the experienced disutility of dread and subsequent decisions about unpleasant outcomes.Making decisions about gains and losses is one of the archetypal problems that all animals face, but when the outcome is temporally delayed from the decision, the problem becomes considerably more complex than simply choosing the course of action with the better expected outcome. Standard economic theory posits that preferences for outcomes that occur at different times can be represented by an expected utility of the future outcomes discounted by the amount of time one must wait for them (1). These theories typically apply discounting under the assumption that people care less about outcomes that are more remote in the future than those that are more imminent, which leads to the prediction that people should want to expedite desired experiences and delay undesirable experiences for as long as possible. A wide range of findings, however, shows that people often exhibit the opposite pattern: They prefer to delay gratifications and to speed up the occurrence of unpleasant outcomes. If people do, indeed, discount the future, then why do they so often exhibit patterns of preference that are the opposite of the predictions of time discounting? The answer, we suggest, lies in the fact that the act of waiting may itself bring subjective benefits or costs, such as the joyous anticipation of waiting for a birthday present or the misery of waiting for a dentist's appointment. In the case of bad outcomes, the problem can be reduced to the utility of dread (2).In contrast to standard discounted utility theory, another type of decision-making model posits that waiting enters the utility function separately from the outcome (3, 4). Here, an individual's preference for waiting at any point in time reflects the relative weight of two considerations:

Why do English players fail in soccer penalty shootouts? A study of team status, self-regulation, and choking under pressure

“…This reflects research finding that people, when given a choice, want to experience unpleasant situations right away, rather than postponing them to later (Berns, Chappelow, Cekic, Zink, Pagnoni, & Martin-Skurski, 2006). Because low response times have been shown in previous studies to be associated with low penalty shot performance (Jordet, in press), one could argue that the behaviours that these players use to respond to the high public team status are self-defeating.…”

Three studies on the neuroeconomics of decision-making when payoffs are real and negative

“…In this chapter, we summarize three neuroeconomic studies previously reported in (Berns et al, 2006;Berns, Capra, Moore, & Noussair, 2007;Berns, Capra, Chappelow, Moore, & Noussair, 2008) and Chandresakhar, Capra, Moore, Noussair, and Berns (2008). There are two features that distinguish these three studies from most others in the experimental economic literature.…”

“…The experiment described in this section (see Berns et al, 2006 for more detail) was designed to distinguish between two potential explanations for why observed decisions might be consistent with negative discounting. One possibility is that, in addition to the utility of the outcome, the anticipation of the outcome may yield utility in itself.…”

“…Surprisingly, the bilateral anterior insula showed the strongest relationship to the degree of rejoice. Although the insula has been linked with painful outcomes (Berns et al, 2006;Brooks & Tracey, 2005;Koyama et al, 2005;Peyron et al, 2002;Ploghaus et al, 1999), its anterior extensions have been characterized as relating to the anticipated emotional state of something potentially painful (Craig, 2003). Its role in rejoice here may reflect the tracking of the ex-ante probability of receiving a shock.…”

“…Negative discounting (see Lowenstein, 1987, or Caplin & Leahy, 2001) is a formulation of the intuition that an individual at times may wish to bring forward an adverse experience to "get it over with," or to postpone a favorable experience as if they wish to "savor" it. The study described in Section 2, also reported in Berns et al (2006), considers the motivation behind the negative discounting of losses, with a focus on the existence and the nature of dread, a disutility associated with the anticipation of a future negative event. Traditional experimental economic methods, which record decisions, can accumulate evidence consistent with the existence of dread by showing that individuals try to avoid it.…”