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Liquid Refreshment

22

Apr

The Way We Think, We Are

Jacob Gaffney  in Health, Living , , , , ,

InterWined recalls a study two yeas ago that found chronic binge drinkers held fond memories of their week-end intoxication, despite putting themselves at risk and, in some instances, becoming injured (either self-inflicted or by others).

The scientists held that this positive reinforcement of negative events compels human behaviour to detriment.

Two new studies revolve around this phenomenon of how our perception sculpts our activities… especially about financial affairs. The second shows that staying positive dissuades us from responsible spending. More importantly, the first study shows that our bodies give us sensory awards, like when we drink a great glass of wine, for less physically tangible experiences.

– Like Fairness for Chocolate

As it turns out, the human brain responds to being treated fairly the same way it responds to winning money and eating chocolate, UCLA scientists report. Being treated fairly turns on the brain’s reward circuitry.

“We may be hard-wired to treat fairness as a reward,” said study co-author Matthew D. Lieberman, UCLA associate professor of psychology and a founder of social cognitive neuroscience.

“Receiving a fair offer activates the same brain circuitry as when we eat craved food, win money or see a beautiful face,” said Golnaz Tabibnia, a postdoctoral scholar at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and lead author of the study, which appears in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science.

The activated brain regions include the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Humans share the ventral striatum with rats, mice and monkeys, Tabibnia said.
“Fairness is activating the same part of the brain that responds to food in rats,” she said. This is consistent with the notion that being treated fairly satisfies a basic need, she added.

In the study, subjects were asked whether they would accept or decline another person’s offer to divide money in a particular way. If they declined, neither they nor the person making the offer would receive anything. Some of the offers were fair, such as receiving $5 out of $10 or $12, while others were unfair, such as receiving $5 out of $23.

“In both cases, they were being offered the same amount of money, but in one case it’s fair and in the other case it’s not,” Tabibnia said.

Almost half the time, people agreed to accept offers of just 20 to 30 percent of the total money, but when they accepted these unfair offers, most of the brain’s reward circuitry was not activated; those brain regions were activated only for the fair offers. Less than 2 percent accepted offers of 10 percent of the total money.

The study group consisted of 12 UCLA students, nine of them female, with an average age of 21. They had their brains scanned at UCLA’s Ahmanson–Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. The subjects saw photographs of various people who were said to be making the offers.

“The brain’s reward regions were more active when people were given a $5 offer out of $10 than when they received a $5 offer out of $23,” Lieberman said. “We call this finding the ’sunny side of fairness’ because it shows the rewarding experience of being treated fairly.”

A region of the brain called the insula, associated with disgust, is more active when people are given insulting offers, Lieberman said.

When people accepted the insulting offers, they tended to turn on a region of the prefrontal cortex that is associated with emotion regulation, while the insula was less active.

“We’re showing what happens in the brain when people swallow their pride,” Tabibnia said. “The region of the brain most associated with self-control gets activated and the disgust-related region shows less of a response.”

– When positive thinking leads to financial irresponsibility like compulsive gambling

Looking on the bright side can lead to irresponsible financial behavior, reveals a paper from the June 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. In a series of studies, Elizabeth Cowley (University of Sydney) examines repeat gambling in the face of loss. She finds that people often engage in too much positive thinking, selectively focusing on one win among hundreds of losses when they think back on the overall experience.

“When we want to justify engaging in an activity which could potentially be irresponsible – like gambling – we may need to distort our memory of the past to rationalize the decision,” Cowley explains. “People who have frequently spent more money than planned on gambling edit their memories of the past in order to justify gambling again.”

For example, Cowley had participants in one study play a computer game in which they could win credits with the financial equivalent of one cent per credit. Each participant played the game 300 times. Everyone experienced one big win and one big loss. But for the other 298 games, one half of the group experienced all small losses, while the other experienced all small wins.

Cowley also manipulated the distance between the big win and the big loss.
A week later, participants were surveyed for their memories of the experience. Surprisingly, Cowley found that even some losers remembered having a positive experience. If the big win and the big loss occurred far apart, losers had fond memories and indicated a willingness to spend their own money on the game.

As Cowley explains, the further apart the big win and the big loss, the easier it was for losers to isolate their memories and focus only on the positive, a “silver lining” effect.

“The tendency to segregate positive and negative events in a mixed-loss experience is based on the logic that remembering a large gain allows people to feel good even when the objective outcome was negative,” Cowley says.

Conversely, Cowley found that winners – those who experienced 298 small wins – were happier when the big win and the big loss were closer together, allowing them to lump all the games together and ignore the big loss. She termed this the “cancellation effect.”

“When the outcome of an experience including both positive and negative events results in a net gain, people look for ways to integrate positive and negative events to reduce, if not cancel, the pain associated with the negative events,” Cowley explains.

The research is the first to consider a motivated memory explanation for justifying irresponsible behavior. Apparently, positive thinking can sometimes be negative.

Elizabeth Cowley, “The Perils of Hedonic Editing.” Journal of Consumer Research: June 2008.

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