From feeling less to doing more: Affective habituation underlies risk escalation

这项研究将检验冒险行为升级背后的机制。有趣的是，低风险行为是极端冒险行为的前提。这项研究将通过测试情感习惯是风险升级的核心这一假设，来调查冒险的小行为是如何滚雪球般地变成极端的、可能危及生命的行为的。其理念是，个人参与风险行为（如赌博、无保护的性行为、极限运动）越多，他们对这种行为的情感唤起就越少。随着对抑制冒险的恐惧减少，个人将逐渐承担越来越大的风险。尽管实际威胁水平保持不变，但一个人参与得越多，风险本身可能被认为越小。该研究将利用行为学、生理学和神经学的方法来研究提出的假设。特别是，它将使用虚拟现实来模拟风险情况，并测量风险的严重程度和生理唤醒。它还将检查金融任务中的冒险行为，并测量与觉醒相关的大脑区域的功能磁共振成像信号。这项研究将在健康和临床人群中进行，比如患有焦虑症的人，他们可能会表现出对风险的情绪适应受损，这可能与低风险行为有关。了解冒险行为为何以及如何升级为可能对经济或身体有害的危险行为，对于开发遏制此类行为的工具和为弱势群体建立预防方案非常重要。这项研究通过增加对人类功能的理解，属于社会科学学科的范畴。特别是，我们改善知情政策、临床治疗和预防计划的能力取决于了解人类思维的功能以及控制行为的情感和动机方面。

The research will examine the mechanism that underlies the escalation of risk-taking behaviors. Anecdotally, low-risk behaviors are the antecedents of extreme risk-taking. The research will investigatehow small acts of risk-taking snowball into extreme and possibly life-threatening behaviors by testing the hypothesis that affective habituation lies at the heart of risk escalation. The idea is that the moreindividuals engage in risky behavior (e.g., gambling, unprotected sex, extreme sport), the less emotionally arousing they will experience that behavior to be. With less fear to curb risk-taking, anindividual will gradually engage in greater and greater risk. The risk itself may be perceived as smaller the more a person engages in it despite the actual threat level remaining the same.The research will utilize behavioral, physiological, and neural methodologies to study the proposed hypothesis. In particular, it will use virtual reality to simulate a situation of risk and measure risk-takingseverity and physiological arousal. It will also examine risk-taking in a financial task and measure fMRI signal in brain regions associated with arousal. The research will be conducted in healthy and clinical populations, such as individuals with anxiety disorders that are expected to exhibit impaired emotional adaptation to risk which might be related to low-risk behaviors.Understanding why and how risk-taking escalates to dangerous behaviors that can be financially or physically detrimental is important for developing tools to curb such behaviors and establishingprevention programs for vulnerable populations. The research falls within the discipline of social science remit by adding to the understanding of human functioning. Particularly, our ability to improve informed policies, clinical treatments, and prevention programs is contingent on knowing how the human mind functions and the emotional and motivational aspects that govern behaviors.