Citric Acid Increases Balloon Inflation (aka sour taste makes you more risky)

fromBalloon Analog Risk Task (BART)– Joggle Research for iPadRisk taking andrisk preference1 are complex constructs measured byself-report questionnaires ( “propensity”), laboratory tasks, and the frequency of real-life behaviors (smoking, alcohol use, etc).  A recent mega-study of 1507 healthy adults byFrey et al. (2017) measured risk preference using six questionnaires (and their subscales), eight behavioral tasks, and six frequency measures of real-life behavior.Table 1 (Frey et al., 2017).Risk-taking measures used in the Basel-Berlin Risk Study.-- click on image for a larger view --The authors were interested in whether they could extract a general factor of risk preference (R), analogous to the general factor of intelligence (g). They used a bifactor model to account for the general factor as well as specific, orthogonal factors (seven in this case). The differing measures above are often used interchangeably and called “risk”, but the general factorR only......explained substantial variance across propensity measures and frequency measures of risky activities but did not generalize to behavioral measures. Moreover, there was only one specific factor that captured common variance across behavioral measures, specifically, choices among different types of risky lotteries (F7). Beyond the variance accounted for by R, the remaining six factors captured specific variance associated with health risk taking (F1), financial risk taking (F2), recreational risk taki...

Source: The Neurocritic - June 17, 2018 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs