Risk-taking Behavior Under the Effect of Emotional Stimuli Among Children and Adults

INTRODUCTION: Risk-taking has an important role in human life, either positive or negative. Finding a method to control or drive this in a particular way can affect the health of individuals and communities by discouraging negative risks, such as reckless driving, or encouraging positive risks. It has been shown that emotion induction can enhance risk-taking behavior. Nonetheless, studies are mainly conducted on adults and a gap to focus on adolescents group as the peak age of risk-taking is required. Therefore, a new risk-taking task is introduced and development of risk-taking behavior in children is compared with a group male adults. In addition, influence of positive and negative emotional images on the risk-taking behavior is also evaluated. METHODS: A total of 21 children and 20 adults participated in this experiment. Their risk taking behavior is obtained using a new version of the dice game task with emotional stimuli. Subsequently, performances of two groups before and after emotional priming are statistically compared. RESULTS: The results showed that children have a higher tendency to choose riskier options when they are affected by positive emotion, while adults are more risk-averse after being primed by negative emotion. CONCLUSION: These findings can be helpful for policymakers and tutoring planners to control risk-taking behavior at different ages using the priming effect of positive and negative emotions. HIGHLIGHTS: Children perform riskier than adults in our new version of the game of dice task. Children are affected by choosing riskier options by positive priming. Adults are affected by choosing less risky options by negative priming. Results were proved by dual-process theory. PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY: Every second of our life is consistent with decision-making. When you decide you face conditions that you do not know the result when you choose them. Choosing these options is associated with risks. Choosing these options can have both advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, it will be very useful for communities, if they can find a way to control it. In this study, we aimed to test whether it is possible to control risk-taking by viewing emotional pictures before decision-making or not. Hence, we design gambling-like experiments and test adults and children using this experiment. These two age groups were used to test the existence of any difference or similarity between their behaviors. We used three main emotions to check their effect on people’s choices. We wanted to check what happens to people’s decisions if they are faced with positive, negative, or neutral images before their choice. Results showed that children were riskier than adults and affected more when facing positive images and selecting riskier options. On the other hand, adults are more affected by negative images and chose safer options after seeing the pictures in this emotion.