An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Menstrual Cycle On Intertemporal Choice And Interpersonal Choice

Previous studies show that the menstrual cycle affects women's intertemporal choice behavior.Women's time discounting rate during luteal phase is significantly lower than the late follicular phase.The related studies use psychological connection to explain that effect and they think decision-maker consider the "future self" who receive rewards after a period of time as a another person and make a choice for himself and others.Interpersonal choice exactly researches social discounting that people choice is affected by different people who receive the rewards.So,the study speculate menstrual cycle will also affect interpersonal choice,and compares the similarities and differences between the effect of menstrual cycle on two types of decision making.And,the study uses FMRI to explore neural basis of this effect.This study recruited women with stable menstrual cycles,and arranged them to complete two types of decision-making tasks in the FMRI in the late follicular phase and luteal phases.The study sets women's menstrual cycle as an independent variable and research the impact of different stages of the menstrual cycle on women's decision-making behavior.In addition,this study also used FMRI to explore the neural basis that influence of menstrual cycle on their decision-making behavior,and collecting their saliva and completing the tasks of time perception and distance perception out of scan.This study analyzes behavioral data and brain data and draws the following conclusions:(1)Menstrual cycle affects intertemporal choice and women's time discounting is significantly higher in late follicular phase than luteal phase.(2)Menstrual cycle affects interpersonal choice and women's social discounting is significantly higher in late follicular phase than luteal phase.(3)The difference in interpersonal choice behaviors between late follicular phase and luteal phase is greater than menstrual cycle's effect on intertemporal decision.(4)Menstrual cycle has a greater impact on social decision-making behavior:comparing to intertemporal choice,social cognition brain have high level of activation in the interpersonal choice,such as ACC,m PFC.In general,the female menstrual cycle has an impact on decision-making behavior and has a greater impact on interpersonal choice.But,there are deficiencies in the study.The study requires participants complete two decision tasks orderly in SCAN.Although the order of completing the experiments has been balanced,it may still not efficiently avoid the influence between tasks.Future research can use the methods to obtain relatively pure data and improve the rigor of the research methods,such as match two groups of participants complete two types of decision tasks respectively or arrange other task between the two types of decision tasks.