From feeling less to doing more: Affective habituation underlies risk escalation

The research will examine the mechanism that underlies the escalation of risk-taking behaviors. Anecdotally, low-risk behaviors are the antecedents of extreme risk-taking. The research will investigate
how small acts of risk-taking snowball into extreme and possibly life-threatening behaviors by testing the hypothesis that affective habituation lies at the heart of risk escalation. The idea is that the more
individuals engage in risky behavior (e.g., gambling, unprotected sex, extreme sport), the less emotionally arousing they will experience that behavior to be. With less fear to curb risk-taking, anindividual will gradually engage in greater and greater risk. The risk itself may be perceived as smaller the more a person engages in it despite the actual threat level remaining the same.
The research will utilize behavioral, physiological, and neural methodologies to study the proposed hypothesis. In particular, it will use virtual reality to simulate a situation of risk and measure risk-taking
severity and physiological arousal. It will also examine risk-taking in a financial task and measure fMRI signal in brain regions associated with arousal. The research will be conducted in healthy and clinical populations, such as individuals with anxiety disorders that are expected to exhibit impaired emotional adaptation to risk which might be related to low-risk behaviors.
Understanding why and how risk-taking escalates to dangerous behaviors that can be financially or physically detrimental is important for developing tools to curb such behaviors and establishing
prevention programs for vulnerable populations. The research falls within the discipline of social science remit by adding to the understanding of human functioning. Particularly, our ability to improve informed policies, clinical treatments, and prevention programs is contingent on knowing how the human mind functions and the emotional and motivational aspects that govern behaviors.