Emotional arousal predicts intertemporal choice.

Abstract

People generally prefer immediate rewards to rewards received after a delay, often even when the delayed reward is larger. This phenomenon is known as temporal discounting. It has been suggested that preferences for immediate rewards may be due to their being more concrete than delayed rewards. This concreteness may evoke an enhanced emotional response. Indeed, manipulating the representation of a future reward to make it more concrete has been shown to heighten the reward’s subjective emotional intensity, making people more likely to choose it. Here we use an objective measure of arousal – pupil dilation – to investigate if emotional arousal mediates the influence of delayed reward concreteness on choice. We recorded pupil dilation responses while participants made choices between immediate and delayed rewards. We manipulated concreteness through time interval framing: delayed rewards were presented either with the date on which they would be received (e.g., “$30, May 3”; DATE condition, more concrete) or in terms of delay to receipt (e.g., “$30, 7 days; DAYS condition, less concrete). Contrary to prior work, participants were not overall more patient in the DATE condition. However, there was individual variability in response to time framing, and this variability was predicted by differences in pupil dilation between conditions. Emotional arousal increased as the subjective value of delayed rewards increased, and predicted choice of the delayed reward on each trial. This study advances our understanding of the role of emotion in temporal discounting.

Cardiac Signals Are Independently Associated with Temporal Discounting and Time Perception

“…The association between TD and heart rate supports the notion that low arousal might be related to higher impulsivity, similar to previous perspectives on trait impulsivity (Eysenck, 1993) and previous research using alternate measures (Mathias and Stanford, 2003; Allen et al, 2009; Lempert et al, 2016). Given the conflicting interpretations of cardiac indices, our results concerning DR are difficult to interpret from a physiological perspective.…”

“…TD has previously been related to other physiological measures, such as pupil dilation (Lempert et al, 2016), but to our knowledge, our study is the first to relate it to cardiac signals. The neurovisceral integration model (Thayer and Lane, 2000, 2009) is built on the notion that greater regulatory control is associated with greater inhibitory parasympathetic functionality.…”

“…However, recent work has shown that during TD tasks, choices toward delayed rewards are more likely when sympathetic responses (measured via pupil dilation) to these options are greater (Lempert et al, 2016). As heart rate is primarily mediated by sympathetic activity, it is possible that the observed association between heart rate and discount rate constitutes a similar phenomenon: individuals with lower discount rates were also the ones with higher sympathetic responses, which reflected their tendency to choose delayed rewards.…”

The drift diffusion model as the choice rule in inter-temporal and risky choice: a case study in medial orbitofrontal cortex lesion patients and controls

“…This modeling framework might provide further insights, e.g. when studying mechanisms underlying context-dependent changes in decision-making [62][63][64][65] or impairments in decision-making in psychiatric disorders 66 .…”

Temporal framing and the hidden‐zero effect: rate‐dependent outcomes on delay discounting

“…These findings suggest that framing delays as days results in fewer LLR choices than when framing delays as either calendar units or specific dates. Lempert, Johnson, and Phelps () produced results at odds with previous demonstrations of the date‐delay effect, reporting that a sample consisting primarily of university students failed to demonstrate a relative preference for the LLR in the specific date conditions. The authors addressed several possible explanations for the discrepant finding, offering that the lack of effect may have been the result of procedural differences (e.g., sequential, rather than simultaneous presentation of the SSR and LLR, within individual comparisons) and/or the length of the delays used in the intertemporal choice task.…”