Emotion and decision-making: Induced mood influences IGT scores and deck selection strategies.

The somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) represents a rich neuropsychological framework to study emotion-based decision-making. It originates from early brain lesion studies using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), which showed that adaptive decision-making relies on intact ventromedial prefrontal cortex for the integration of so-called "hot" affective signals and rational "cold" perceptual cognitive computations. Subsequent studies over the past 20 years have provided converging evidence for the reliability and validity of the IGT in assessing decision-making in both healthy and clinical samples, although some discrepancies remain. In healthy individuals, it has been shown that differences in emotional states prior to taking the IGT result in different outcomes, thus potentially accounting for some of the variation within this group. However, the precise role of such transient modulations of emotional states remains unclear. In this study we sought to examine the role of specific induced moods under carefully controlled conditions. Accordingly, we randomly assigned 44 healthy college undergraduates to a positive, negative, or neutral affect condition in which they simultaneously viewed images and listened to music that previous studies had shown to induce specific moods. Results indicated that mood induction was successful, and the positive affect group showed a clearly different pattern of IGT performance compared to the other two groups, in that they showed a rapidly established and stable bias favoring the positive expected value (EV) card decks. The negative affect group showed significantly lower bias towards the positive EV decks, although this group was not different from the neutral affect group. Bayesian analyses confirmed these findings. While consistent with SMH, these current findings may be best understood in support of a more general effect of normal mood on cognition as outlined in the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.

Can't Read my Broker Face: Learning About Trustworthiness With Age.

Objectives: We assessed how age impacted learning who to trust, and the extent to which this type of learning relied on explicit memory. In contrast to prior studies, target faces were neutral without prior reputational information. Method: Younger (YA) and older adults (OA) made investment decisions for 36 brokers, who yielded a good, neutral, or bad outcome. Brokers were encountered three times to measure adaptive learning. After the investment task, participants completed a surprise explicit source memory test for brokers. Results: Although YA and OA learned to distinguish good and bad brokers from neutral ones, OA did not learn the brokers' behavior as well as younger adults. In addition, explicit source memory was highly correlated with investment decisions, although less so for good brokers for older than younger adults. Discussion: Findings extend prior work by establishing that OA impairments in learning who to trust extend to neutral faces, and highlighting the role of explicit memory in investment performance. Future work should vary the task demands to explore the contribution of explicit and implicit processes.