The Iowa Gambling Task in Violent and Nonviolent Incarcerated Male Adolescents

Abstract

Previous studies have found impaired affective decision-making, as measured by the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), in various antisocial populations. This is the first study to compare the IGT in violent and nonviolent incarcerated American youth. The IGT was administered to 185 incarcerated adolescent male offenders charged with either nonviolent (38.4%) or violent (61.6%) crimes. General linear mixed models and t tests were used to assess differences between the groups. The full sample performed worse than if they had selected from the decks at random. The violent offenders performed more poorly than the nonviolent offenders overall, primarily because they preferred “disadvantageous” Deck B to a greater degree; however, they did demonstrate some degree of learning by the final block of the task. Adolescent offenders demonstrate impaired affective decision-making. Behavior suggested preferential attention to frequency of loss and amount of gain and inattention to amount of loss.

Aggressive and psychopathic traits are linked to the acquisition of stable but imprecise hostile expectations

“…Indeed, while volatility was higher in the high threat condition, aggressive and psychopathic traits were linked with lower volatility. Such a pattern is broadly consistent with the well-documented impairments in reinforcement-learning displayed by psychopathic individuals, who fail to flexibly adapt to changes in the environment [16][17][18][19] . This deficit might be partially due to an "exaggerated attentional bottleneck", i.e., a tendency to distribute attentional resources suboptimally and filtering out too much relevant information when multiple streams of information need to be processed 71 .…”

“…Here, we propose that the tendency to form HEX reflects a reinforcement learning disruption in which non-threatening events are erroneously associated with hostile outcomes. This notion is wellaligned with a growing body of research showing reinforcement learning deficits among antisocial individuals [16][17][18][19] . Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning in social contexts is partly driven by individuals' beliefs concerning the volatility of the environment 3,20 , the belief that a given outcome will follow 21 , the accuracy of this belief 4,5 , and the discrepancy between actual and expected outcomes, i.e., the prediction error 22,23 .…”

Youth and the justice system.

“…Adolescents are more likely to actively seek out rewarding experiences, with greater sensitivity to positive feedback. Adolescents view potential rewards as more important for decision making than avoiding negative consequences (Umbach et al, 2019), and they do not fully develop the capacity to inhibit their impulses until their mid-20s or later (see the review by Shulman et al, 2016). Youth thus remain susceptible across this developmental period to risk taking and, in a more serious form, criminal behavior.…”

The assessment of affective decision‐making: Exploring alternative scoring methods for the Balloon Analog Risk Task and Columbia Card Task

“…It has been widely used across various populations with significant real-world implications. For example, problem-gamblers (Brevers et al, 2013), patients with substance abuse (Buelow & Suhr, 2009), violent criminals (Umbach et al, 2019), and children with foetal alcohol syndrome (Kully-Martens et al, 2013), have all showed impaired decision-making on the IGT when compared to control groups. Furthermore, IGT performance has been shown to be predictive of both gambling behaviors and diagnostic criteria for gambling disorders (Brevers et al, 2013).…”