The Influence And The Mechanism Of Stress On Risk Decision

Research purpose:In our daily lives,we are faced with a variety of risky decision-making situations,and there is a complex relationship between stress and risky decision-making.Stress can have a significant impact on our decision-making process and may lead us to make impulsive,dangerous,or inappropriate decisions.Understanding how stress affects risky decision making and how it affects it can help us better understand the potential consequences of stress and accordingly make strategies to mitigate its negative impact on risky decision making behavior.In this study,the effects of stress on risky decision making were investigated in terms of acute stress and chronic stress,respectively.Study 1 was conducted using an event-related potential technique.A combined Social Cold Stress Assessment Test and a mental arithmetic task were used to induce acute stress in the participants.Participants were then asked to make a financial risk decision task to investigate the effect of acute stress on risk decision making and its mechanisms.Study 2 is a study of the effects of chronic stress on risky decision making conducted under natural conditions.Using machine learning methods,this study explores which features of chronic stress may have a greater effect on risk decisions.Moreover,this study attempts to understand the rules of association between outcome feedback and the follow risk decision-making when they make risky decisions under chronic stress conditions.Materials and Methods:Study 1: Participants were randomly recruited to complete the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory,and participants without trait anxiety were selected to attend the experiment.This study used a within-subjects experimental design in which all participants were required to complete a risk-decision task in both acute stress condition and control condition.Heart rate and blood pressure were used as physiological indicators of acute stress induction,and Positive and Negative Affective Scale scores were used as subjective indicators to test acute stress induction operation and control operation.Event-related potential data of the participants were recorded during the experiment.Study 2: An online risk decision experiment was conducted under natural conditions among undergraduate students one week before they took their final exams at the end of the semester,and again one week after the start of the summer as a control condition,so as to analyze the risk decision behavior of the participants under chronic stress condition and control condition.Using decision trees and random forest algorithms,a predictive model for chronic stress on monetary risk decisions was fitted to develop and the importance of each feature of chronic stress to the predictive model was analyzed.Using an association rule algorithm,rules were explored between decision outcome feedback and subsequent decision behavior when participants conducted a financial risk decision experiment,to investigate the influence of decision outcome feedback on risky decisions under chronic stress.Result:Study 1:1.Heart rate,blood pressure and positive and negative affective scale results showed that acute stress was successfully induced in the subjects.2.In the analysis of FRN components,the FRN amplitude was significantly greater for the control condition than for the stress condition.FRN amplitude was significantly greater for the high-risk option feedback than for the low-risk option.The stress condition significantly reduced the FRN amplitude at the high-risk level,while the difference in FRN amplitude between subjects in the stress condition and the control condition at the low-risk level was not significant.3.The analysis of P3 amplitude shows that the P3 amplitude of the benefit outcome is significantly larger than that of the loss outcome.High-risk P3 amplitudes were significantly larger than low-risk P3 amplitudes.The difference in P3 amplitude between benefit and loss for subjects in the acute stress condition was significantly smaller than the difference in P3 amplitude between benefit and loss in the control condition.Study 2:1.The probability of making monetary risk decisions was significantly smaller in the chronic stress condition than in the control condition,and the probability of making risk decisions in the benefit framework was significantly smaller than in the control condition.2.The predictive model of chronic stress states on monetary risk decision-making behavior generated using decision trees and random forest algorithms fit well,with the length of time remaining until final exams having the highest feature importance in the model,followed by the length of time spent conducting final review.3.In association rule mining,each time a conservative decision is made in the chronic stress condition to receive conservative feedback,it has an impact on subsequent decision behavior,and all of them are associated with making conservative decisions again.The probability of conservative feedback determining subsequent decisions is greater in the chronic stress condition than in the control condition,and the influence on subsequent decisions is more sustained,and association rules that jointly lead to subsequent conservative decisions with other conservative feedback appear.Conclusion:1.Acute stress impairs the ability of individuals to effectively process feedback to adjust risk decision behavior during the risk decision-making process,reduces the sensitivity to reward-related information,impairs the processing of information related to potential gains and losses,and individuals may rely more on the impulsive system to make decisions during acute stress.2.Individuals under chronic stress have increased concern for negative emotions associated with high risk,have higher perceptions of risk,and are biased toward conservative decision making.The intensity and duration of chronic stress have greater importance in predicting risky decision-making behavior.Conservative feedback for conservative decisions in chronic stress leads individuals to make more conservative decisions,and this effect is greater and more sustained.