Affect-Laden Imagery and Risk Taking: The Mediating Role of Stress and Risk Perception

This paper investigates how affect-laden imagery that evokes emotional stress influences risk perception and risk taking in real-life scenarios. In a series of three studies, we instructed participants to imagine the consequences of risky scenarios and then rate the intensity of the experienced stre...

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Main Authors:	Traczyk, Jakub, Sobkow, Agata, Zaleskiewicz, Tomasz
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2015
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4376914/

id	pubmed-4376914
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-43769142015-04-03 Affect-Laden Imagery and Risk Taking: The Mediating Role of Stress and Risk Perception Traczyk, Jakub Sobkow, Agata Zaleskiewicz, Tomasz Research Article This paper investigates how affect-laden imagery that evokes emotional stress influences risk perception and risk taking in real-life scenarios. In a series of three studies, we instructed participants to imagine the consequences of risky scenarios and then rate the intensity of the experienced stress, perceived risk and their willingness to engage in risky behavior. Study 1 showed that people spontaneously imagine negative rather than positive risk consequences, which are directly related to their lower willingness to take risk. Moreover, this relationship was mediated by feelings of stress and risk perception. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings by showing that imagining negative risk consequences evokes psychophysiological stress responses observed in elevated blood pressure. Finally, in Study 3, we once again demonstrated that a higher intensity of mental images of negative risk consequences, as measured by enhanced brain activity in the parieto-occipital lobes, leads to a lower propensity to take risk. Furthermore, individual differences in creating vivid and intense negative images of risk consequences moderated the strength of the relationship between risk perception and risk taking. Participants who created more vivid and intense images of negative risk consequences paid less attention to the assessments of riskiness in rating their likelihood to take risk. To summarize, we showed that feelings of emotional stress and perceived riskiness mediate the relationship between mental imagery and risk taking, whereas individual differences in abilities to create vivid mental images may influence the degree to which more cognitive risk assessments are used in the risk-taking process. Public Library of Science 2015-03-27 /pmc/articles/PMC4376914/ /pubmed/25816238 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0122226 Text en © 2015 Traczyk et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Traczyk, Jakub Sobkow, Agata Zaleskiewicz, Tomasz
spellingShingle	Traczyk, Jakub Sobkow, Agata Zaleskiewicz, Tomasz Affect-Laden Imagery and Risk Taking: The Mediating Role of Stress and Risk Perception
author_facet	Traczyk, Jakub Sobkow, Agata Zaleskiewicz, Tomasz
author_sort	Traczyk, Jakub
title	Affect-Laden Imagery and Risk Taking: The Mediating Role of Stress and Risk Perception
title_short	Affect-Laden Imagery and Risk Taking: The Mediating Role of Stress and Risk Perception
title_full	Affect-Laden Imagery and Risk Taking: The Mediating Role of Stress and Risk Perception
title_fullStr	Affect-Laden Imagery and Risk Taking: The Mediating Role of Stress and Risk Perception
title_full_unstemmed	Affect-Laden Imagery and Risk Taking: The Mediating Role of Stress and Risk Perception
title_sort	affect-laden imagery and risk taking: the mediating role of stress and risk perception
description	This paper investigates how affect-laden imagery that evokes emotional stress influences risk perception and risk taking in real-life scenarios. In a series of three studies, we instructed participants to imagine the consequences of risky scenarios and then rate the intensity of the experienced stress, perceived risk and their willingness to engage in risky behavior. Study 1 showed that people spontaneously imagine negative rather than positive risk consequences, which are directly related to their lower willingness to take risk. Moreover, this relationship was mediated by feelings of stress and risk perception. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings by showing that imagining negative risk consequences evokes psychophysiological stress responses observed in elevated blood pressure. Finally, in Study 3, we once again demonstrated that a higher intensity of mental images of negative risk consequences, as measured by enhanced brain activity in the parieto-occipital lobes, leads to a lower propensity to take risk. Furthermore, individual differences in creating vivid and intense negative images of risk consequences moderated the strength of the relationship between risk perception and risk taking. Participants who created more vivid and intense images of negative risk consequences paid less attention to the assessments of riskiness in rating their likelihood to take risk. To summarize, we showed that feelings of emotional stress and perceived riskiness mediate the relationship between mental imagery and risk taking, whereas individual differences in abilities to create vivid mental images may influence the degree to which more cognitive risk assessments are used in the risk-taking process.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2015
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4376914/
_version_	1613204600676941824

Affect-Laden Imagery and Risk Taking: The Mediating Role of Stress and Risk Perception

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