Many studies claim to measure decision-making under risk by employing the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) scale, a self-report measure, or the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), a behavioural task. However, these tasks do not measure decision-making under risk but decision-making under uncertainty, a related but distinct concept. The present commentary discusses both the theoretical and empirical basis of the distinction between uncertainty and risk from the viewpoint of several scientific disciplines and reports how many studies wrongfully employ the DOSPERT scale and BART as risk-taking measures. Importantly, we call for proper distinguishing between (tasks measuring) decision-making under uncertainty and decision-making under risk in psychology, and related fields. We believe this is vital as research has shown that people’s attitudes, behaviour, and brain activity differ between both concepts, indicating that confusing the concepts may lead researchers to erroneous conclusions.

Studies in the field of psychology often employ (computerized) behavioral tasks, aimed at mimicking real-world situations that elicit certain actions in participants. Such tasks are for example used to study risk propensity, a trait-like tendency towards taking or avoiding risk. One of the most popular tasks for gauging risk propensity is the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; Lejuez et al., 2002), which has been shown to relate well to self-reported risk-taking and to real-world risk behaviors. However, despite its popularity and qualities, the BART has several methodological shortcomings, most of which have been reported before, but none of which are widely known. In the present paper, four such problems are explained and elaborated on: a lack of clarity as to whether decisions are characterized by uncertainty or risk; censoring of observations; confounding of risk and expected value; and poor decomposability into adaptive and maladaptive risk behavior. Furthermore, for every problem, a range of possible solutions is discussed, which overall can be divided into three categories: using a different, more informative outcome index than the standard average pump score; modifying one or more task elements; or using a different task, either an alternative risk-taking task (sequential or otherwise), or a custom-made instrument. It is important to make use of these solutions, as applying the BART without accounting for its shortcomings may lead to interpretational problems, including false-positive and false-negative results. Depending on the research aims of a given study, certain shortcomings are more pressing than others, indicating the (type of) solutions most needed. By combining solutions and openly discussing shortcomings, researchers may be able to modify the BART in such a way that it can operationalize risk propensity without substantial methodological problems.

The broad autism phenotype implies the existence of a continuum ranging from individuals displaying almost no autistic traits to severely impaired diagnosed individuals. Recent studies have linked this variation in autistic traits to several domains of functioning. However, studies focusing on social-communicational traits associated with autism often suffer from two problems. First, they examine very specific behaviours, not taking the broad range of behaviours social functioning is comprised of into account. Second, most studies compare individuals scoring at the upper and lower extremes of the continuum, neglecting the natural range of autistic trait scores. The present study accommodates for these limitations by examining the link between self-reported autistic traits and a broad self-report measure of social functioning across individuals exhibiting a natural range of autistic traits. The results show that after tackling the discussed limitations, autistic traits still predict the amount of social behaviour people exhibit and the level of discomfort they experience when doing so. The amount of social behaviour and the experienced discomfort were especially related to autistic traits in the social and attention switching domains. The findings were still significant after controlling for the conceptual overlap with the social domain of the autism measure. These findings support the broad autism phenotype by showing how a continuous measure of autistic traits is related to a continuous measure of social functioning.

There is a multitude of mHealth applications that aim to solve societal health problems by stimulating specific types of physical activities via gamification. However, physical health activities cover just one of the three World Health Organization (WHO) dimensions of health. This paper introduces the novel notion of Unified Health Gamification (UHG), which covers besides physical health also social and cognitive health and well-being. Instead of rewarding activities in the three WHO dimensions using different mHealth competitions, UHG combines the scores for such activities on unified leaderboards and lets people interact in social circles beyond personal interests. This approach is promising in corporate environments since UHG can connect the employees with intrinsic motivation for physical health with those who have quite different interests. In order to evaluate this approach, we realized an app prototype and we evaluated it in two corporate pilot studies. In total, eighteen pilot users participated voluntarily for six weeks. Half of the participants were recruited from an occupational health setting and the other half from a treatment setting. Our results suggest that the UHG principles are worth more investigation: various positive health effects were found based on a validated survey. The mean mental health improved significantly at one pilot location and at the level of individual pilot participants, multiple other effects were found to be significant: among others, significant mental health improvements were found for 28% of the participants. Most participants intended to use the app beyond the pilot, especially if it would be further developed.

Given the importance of risk‐taking in individuals’ personal and professional life, several behavioral tasks for measuring the construct have been developed. Recently, a new task was introduced, the Columbia Card Task (CCT). This task measures participants’ risk levels and establishes how sensitive participants are to gains, losses, and probabilities when taking risk. So far, the CCT has been examined in behavioral studies and in combination with several (neuro)biological techniques. However, no electroencephalography (EEG) research has been done on the task. The present study fills this gap and helps to validate this relatively new experimental task. To this end, n = 126 students were asked to complete self‐reports (reward responsiveness, impulsiveness, and sensation‐seeking) and to perform the CCT (and other risk tasks) in an EEG setup. The results show that feedback appraisal after risky decision‐making in the CCT was accompanied by a feedback‐related negativity (FRN) and a P300, which were stronger in response to negative than positive feedback. Correlations between the FRN and P300 difference wave on the one hand and risk‐related self‐reports and behavior on the other were nonsignificant and small, but were mostly in the expected direction. This pattern did not change after excluding participants with psychiatric/neurological disorders and outliers. Excluding participants with reversed (positive > negative) difference waves strengthened FRN correlations. The impact such individuals can have on the data should be taken into account in future studies. Regarding the CCT in particular, future studies should also address its oddball structure and its masking of true values (censoring).

No abstract

Previous research into uncertain and risky decision-making in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been inconclusive, with some studies reporting less uncertain and risky decisions by persons with ASD compared to neurotypicals, but other studies failing to find such effects. A possible explanation for these inconsistent findings is that aberrant decision-making in ASD is domain-specific, and only manifests itself in domains related to autism symptomatology. The present study examines this premise by correlating self-reported autistic traits to individuals' intention to engage in risky behaviours, their perception of how risky these behaviours are, and the amount of benefit they expect to obtain from engaging in them; all for five separate domains of decision-making: social, ethical, recreational, health/safety, and financial. In line with the hypotheses, persons with higher autistic traits reported reduced intention to engage in risky social behaviours and increased intention to engage in risky ethical behaviours. Furthermore, a positive correlation was found between autistic traits and risk perception in the social domain, indicating that persons with higher autistic traits perceive social behaviours as riskier than do persons with lower autistic traits. Correlations between autistic traits and individuals' intention to engage in risky recreational and financial behaviours were small, and supported the null hypothesis (as shown by Bayes Factors). Given that most studies on uncertain and risky decision-making take place in a financial context, the present results could explain previous inconsistent findings on decision-making in ASD. Therefore, future studies should also examine decision-making outside the financial realm.

Although not used as a diagnostic criterion, impaired emotion regulation is frequently observed in autism. The present study examined self-reported use of emotion regulation strategies in individuals scoring low or high on autistic traits. In addition, the late positive potential, which is sensitive to emotional arousal, was used to examine the effect of one strategy, reappraisal. Reporting more autistic traits was related to using more maladaptive and fewer adaptive emotion regulation strategies. Across both groups, no attenuation of the late positive potential during downregulation of unpleasant pictures was found, possibly because of the used valence-changing reappraisal operationalisation. Hence, although self-report indicated impaired emotion regulation in individuals high on autistic traits, electrophysiological findings could not confirm this.