The Effect Of Anticipation Before Decision-Making On Sequential Risk Taking And Regret

Humans cope with the circumstances full of risk around them and make risky decisions in daily life.As one of the most commonly experienced emotion accompany with risky decisions,regret is aroused from the comparison between “what is” and“what could have been”.Specifically,if the rejected alternatives were better than the factual outcome of their decision,people would experience regret.Previous studies revealed that regret,a negative emotion,might be harmful for the mental health.What’s more,researchers found that regret could lead to irrational decisions deviate from the goal of benefit maximization.Therefore,how to modulate and reduce regret is of wide concern.Previous studies showed that regret could be modulated by a variety of strategies,such as cognitive reappraisal and attentional deployment.However,these strategies were carried out after the outcome of the decision was emerged and could not influence the decision.Some researchers indicated that anticipation before decisions could not only modulate regret,but also optimize decisions.The current dissertation,containing two studies(each consists of three experiments),aimed to investigate the effect of anticipation before decision on regret and risk-taking behavior during the sequential risk-taking task.There was a devil in each trial while others were the coins.If the devil was revealed,then this served to zero the participant’s gain in that trial(Loss outcome).Once stopped,participant’s gains and missed chances were revealed(Gain outcome).In the first study,by setting anticipation(participants anticipated the possible outcome before sequential decisions)and non-anticipation conditions,the effects of anticipation on both regret and decision were investigated.Specifically,experiment 1(behavioral experiment)investigated the effect of anticipation on regret and decision on the behavioral level by manipulating Anticipation and Non-anticipation conditions.Experiment 2(fMRI experiment)and experiment 3(EEG experiment)aimed to investigate the effects of anticipation on both regret and decision at the neural level.Based on the first study,the second study,consisting of experiment 4(behavioral experiment),experiment 5(fMRI experiment),and experiment 6(EEG experiment),added high and low risk situations by changing the value of each decision to investigate how risk situation modulates the effect of anticipation on regret and decision.Through the six experiments,the behavioral results showed that,in Loss outcome,compared with non-anticipation condition,participants were less sensitive to loss outcome in anticipation condition,that is,with increasing number of loss coins,participants feel less regret in anticipation condition.After adding different risk situations,the same results were also found,furthermore,the results showed that the effect of anticipation on regret was not affected by high and low risk situations.As for Gain outcome,there were no differences in emotional sensitivity between anticipation condition and non-anticipation condition.What’s more,as for the effect of anticipation on risk-taking behavior,the results showed that compared to non-anticipation condition,the proportion of opening high-risk boxes increased in anticipation condition.After adding different risk situations,the results showed that the effect of anticipation on risk-taking behavior was not affected by different risk situations.At the neural level,fMRI results showed that the activation of lateral prefrontal cortex(LPFC)for the Loss outcome was stronger in anticipation condition than that in non-anticipation condition.Furthermore,the result showed that the activation of LPFC was only affected by anticipation and was not modulated by different risk situations.Besides,brain-behavioral correlation analyses showed that the activation of LPFC was negatively correlated with the intense of regret in Non-anticipation condition;while no such significant correlation was found in anticipation condition.It sproposed that LPFC paticipated in the modulation of anticipation on regret.EEG results showed that the amplitude of P2 component for the Loss outcome was stronger in anticipation condition than that in non-anticipation condition.After adding different risk situations,the results showed that the effect of anticipation on P2 component was not affected by risk situations.Besides,by using EEG,which noninvasively measures the fields generated by neural activities with millisecond-scale temporal resolution,the EEG study decoded the neural activity patterns during sequential risk-taking process.The results showed that the decoding accuracy in anticipation condition was higher than that in non-anticipation condition.Moreover,the results showed that the differences of decoding accuracy between anticipation and non-anticipation conditions was related to the differences of risk-taking behavior between the two conditions,which suggested that the increasing of risk-taking behavior might be related to the higher decoding accuracy in anticipation condition.In conclusion,the current dissertation investigated the effect of anticipation before decision-making on regret and risk-taking behavior,as well as the related neural mechanism by using a sequential risk-taking task.The results suggested that anticipation before decision-making could modulate regret and risk-taking behavior,and this modulation was not affected by different risk situations.The current findings might provide a new way to improve individuals’ mental health and decision-making quality.