Prefrontal brain activity explains link between decision bias and mental resilience

Whether people are mulling over the pros and cons of a purchase or assessing their interactions with new people, they may show a bias in placing more value on perceived positive or negative information. In a new JNeurosci paper, Ulrike Basten and colleagues, from RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau and the University of Amsterdam, explored whether individual differences in processing benefits and costs are linked to psychological resilience. 

The researchers presented 82 participants with images of different colored shapes. Colors and shapes were associated with gains or losses that culminated in real earned money or costs at the end of the experiment. Given the same presentation of different colored shapes, some participants generally put less value on minor losses, which led them to accept more of the offers. Emphasizing this point further, says Basten, "These individuals don't put more value on rewards, they put less value on negative consequences and have a higher tendency to accept offers with mixed consequences. How they process negative information is different." Why might this be the case? The researchers found that participants who put less value on minor losses had stronger increases in prefrontal brain activity to the losses and more reduced activity when they received gains. These brain response differences mediated the link between the acceptance bias in decision-making and higher self-reported psychological resilience. 

According to the researchers, their work suggests that stronger prefrontal brain responses to negative information may enable people to control their thoughts and feelings about losses. This control may be what makes these people more psychologically resilient. Says Basten, "We can't claim causality from our findings, so one next step could be to manipulate the bias by rewarding certain answers-essentially training people to show more positive bias in decision-making-and see if that leads to better resilience."