Schedule of Events | Symposia

Unpredictable auditory stimuli and risk-taking: The role of executive functioning, affect, and sensation-seeking.

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Calvin Moen¹ (cwmoen@edgewood.edu), Ferrinne Spector; ¹Edgewood College

Risk-taking behavior is influenced by complex interactions between cognitive and emotional processes such as executive functioning and anxiety. This study examines how unpredictable aversive auditory stimuli impact risk-taking preferences, and how individual differences in executive functioning moderate this relationship. Adult participants (n = 27) completed a modified Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), a virtual gambling task involving the inflation of a balloon for a cash reward at the risk of it popping. This task was completed across three conditions, a control condition and two unpredictable sound conditions. Auditory stimuli were drawn from the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS-2) database to evoke anxiety without excessive distress. The unpredictable sounds were either response-bound, playing randomly only after a response, or temporally bound, which presented randomly throughout. Affective states were measured using an Affective Slider measuring affective valence and intensity before and after each condition. The experimental conditions had significant effects on affect, with a decrease in positive affect (F = 16.55, p<.001) and increase in intensity (F = 4.09, p<.01). Overall, sound condition did not affect response (F = 1.547, p = 0.225). However, regression analysis showed that state affect, executive functioning, sensation-seeking, and difficulties in emotion regulation explained a considerable degree of variance in risk taking - as measured by number of balloon “pumps” across conditions (R2 = .519, p<.001) with higher sensation seeking scores and positive affect significantly predicting the number of pumps. The study highlights the nuanced relationships between traits and affect in risk-taking behavior.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Other