Although the prevalent view of emotion and decision making is derived from the notion that there are dual systems of emotion and reason, a modulatory relationship more accurately reflects the current research in affective neuroscience and neuroeconomics. Studies show two potential mechanisms for affect's modulation of the computation of subjective value and decisions. Incidental affective states may carry over to the assessment of subjective value and the decision, and emotional reactions to the choice may be incorporated into the value calculation. In addition, this modulatory relationship is reciprocal: Changing emotion can change choices. This research suggests that the neural mechanisms mediating the relation between affect and choice vary depending on which affective component is engaged and which decision variables are assessed. We suggest that a detailed and nuanced understanding of emotion and decision making requires characterizing the multiple modulatory neural circuits underlying the different means by which emotion and affect can influence choices.

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor, and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations, and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common,

Intertemporal choices are ubiquitous: people often have to choose between outcomes realized at different times. Although it is generally believed that people have stable tendencies toward being impulsive or patient, an emerging body of evidence indicates that intertemporal choice is malleable and can be profoundly influenced by context. How the choice is framed, or the state of the decision-maker at the time of choice, can induce a shift in preference. Framing effects are underpinned by: allocation of attention to choice attributes, reference-dependence and time construal. Incidental affective states and prospection also influence intertemporal choice. We advocate that intertemporal choice models account for these context effects, and encourage the use of this knowledge to nudge people toward making more advantageous choices.

The National Institute of Mental Health launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative to better understand dimensions of behavior and identify targets for treatment. Examining dimensions across psychiatric illnesses has proven challenging, as reliable behavioral paradigms that are known to engage specific neural circuits and translate across diagnostic populations are scarce. Delay discounting paradigms seem to be an exception: they are useful for understanding links between neural systems and behavior in healthy individuals, with potential for assessing how these mechanisms go awry in psychiatric illnesses. This article reviews relevant literature on delay discounting (or the rate at which the value of a reward decreases as the delay to receipt increases) in humans, including methods for examining it, its putative neural mechanisms, and its application in psychiatric research. There exist rigorous and reproducible paradigms to evaluate delay discounting, standard methods for calculating discount rate, and known neural systems probed by these paradigms. Abnormalities in discounting have been associated with psychopathology ranging from addiction (with steep discount rates indicating relative preference for immediate rewards) to anorexia nervosa (with shallow discount rates indicating preference for future rewards). The latest research suggests that delay discounting can be manipulated in the laboratory. Extensively studied in cognitive neuroscience, delay discounting assesses a dimension of behavior that is important for decision-making and is linked to neural substrates and to psychopathology. The question now is whether manipulating delay discounting can yield clinically significant changes in behavior that promote health. If so, then delay discounting could deliver on the RDoC promise.

During value-based decision-making, individuals consider the various options and select the one that provides the maximum subjective value. Although the brain integrates abstract information to compute and compare these values, the only behavioral outcome is often the decision itself. However, if the options are visual stimuli, during deliberation the brain moves the eyes from one stimulus to the other. Previous work suggests that saccade vigor, i.e., peak velocity as a function of amplitude, is greater if reward is associated with the visual stimulus. This raises the possibility that vigor during the free viewing of options may be influenced by the valuation of each option. Here, humans chose between a small, immediate monetary reward and a larger but delayed reward. As the deliberation began, vigor was similar for the saccades made to the two options but diverged 0.5 s before decision time, becoming greater for the preferred option. This difference in vigor increased as a function of the difference in the subjective values that the participant assigned to the delayed and immediate options. After the decision was made, participants continued to gaze at the options, but with reduced vigor, making it possible to infer timing of the decision from the sudden drop in vigor. Therefore, the subjective value that the brain assigned to a stimulus during decision-making affected the motor system via the vigor with which the eyes moved toward that stimulus.

The sources of evidence contributing to metacognitive assessments of confidence in decision-making remain unclear. Previous research has shown that pupil dilation is related to the signaling of uncertainty in a variety of decision tasks. Here we ask whether pupil dilation is also related to metacognitive estimates of confidence. Specifically, we measure the relationship between pupil dilation and confidence during an auditory decision task using a general linear model approach to take into account delays in the pupillary response. We found that pupil dilation responses track the inverse of confidence before but not after a decision is made, even when controlling for stimulus difficulty. In support of an additional post-decisional contribution to the accuracy of confidence judgments, we found that participants with better metacognitive ability – that is, more accurate appraisal of their own decisions – showed a tighter relationship between post-decisional pupil dilation and confidence. Together our findings show that a physiological index of uncertainty, pupil dilation, predicts both confidence and metacognitive accuracy for auditory decisions.

Delay discounting refers to the reduction of the value of a future reward as the delay to that reward increases. The rate at which individuals discount future rewards varies as a function of both individual and contextual differences, and high delay discounting rates have been linked with problematic behaviors, including drug abuse and gambling. The current study investigated the effects of acute anticipatory stress on delay discounting, while considering two important factors: individual perceptions of stress and whether the stressful situation is future-focused or present-focused. Half of the participants experienced acute stress by anticipating giving a videotaped speech. This stress was either future-oriented (speech about future job) or present-oriented (speech about physical appearance). They then performed a delay discounting task, in which they chose between smaller, immediate rewards, and larger, delayed rewards. Their scores on the Perceived Stress Scale were also collected. The way in which one appraises stressful situations interacts with acute stress to influence choices; under stressful conditions, delay discounting rate was highest in individuals with low trait perceived stress and lowest for individuals with high trait perceived stress. This result might be related to individual variation in reward responsiveness under stress. Furthermore, the time orientation of the task interacted with its stressfulness to affect the individual’s propensity to choose immediate rewards. These findings add to our understanding of the intermediary factors between stress and decision-making.

Anhedonia (lack of reactivity to pleasurable stimuli) and a negatively skewed view of the future are important components of depression that could affect economic decisions in depressed individuals. Delay discounting paradigms might be useful for probing putative affective and cognitive underpinnings of such decisions. As a first step to evaluate whether difficulties experiencing pleasure might affect delay discounting, 36 undergraduate students with varying levels of anhedonia performed a delay discounting task in which they made choices between a small immediate and larger future monetary reward. Increasing levels of anhedonia (Snaith-Hamilton Pleasure Scale) were negatively associated with delay discounting rate, indicating that anhedonic individuals tended to choose the larger, albeit delayed reward. These correlations remained after controlling for variables previously linked to delay discounting (working memory capacity and impulsivity) and pessimistic future-directed thinking. The current findings provide preliminary evidence indicating that anhedonic individuals make less myopic decisions about their future, possibly due to their decreased responsiveness to immediate rewards.