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Feeling Good and Taking a Chance? Associations of Hypomania Risk with Cognitive and Behavioral Risk Taking

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Abstract

Although elevated impulsivity among individuals at risk for or with a clinical history of mania has been identified in prior work, questions remain regarding ways in which impulsivity may manifest as risky decision-making and behavior. The present investigation examined how hypomania risk, measured using the Hypomanic Personality Scale, was associated with two facets of risk-taking: cognitive appraisals of risks and benefits that will result from risk-taking, and behavioral risk-taking on a validated task and self-report measures. Hypomania risk was associated with appraising future risk-taking as having less costs, but was unrelated to appraising future risk-taking as having more benefits. On behavioral risk measures, it was associated with increased expectations of engagement in risky behavior over the next 6 months, yet also with markers of lower risk-taking on the BART. The present findings have implications for understanding precise cognitive and behavioral factors that underlie the relationship between hypomania risk and risk-taking.

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Notes

  1. All variables were assessed for skewness and kurtosis and outliers were identified. Kurtotic variables were log-transformed and outliers were winsorized; however, these processes did not change any results. Therefore, all variables were used in their original format.

  2. Linear regressions were run to examine if there was a significant interaction between HPS and current PA scores. It was found that this interaction did not significantly predict any of our outcome variables of interest.

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Acknowledgments

June Gruber is supported by a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. Data from this manuscript was presented as a poster at the 2013 Society for Research in Psychopathology (SRP) conference.

Conflict of Interest

Hillary Devlin, Sheri Johnson, and June Gruber declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Informed Consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (national and by the Yale University institutional review board). Informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to the study.

Animal Rights

No animal studies were carried out by the authors for this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Hillary C. Devlin

  2. Department of Psychology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Sheri L. Johnson

  3. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, 345 UCB Muenzinger D321C, Boulder, CO, 80309-0345, USA

    June Gruber

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  1. Hillary C. Devlin
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  2. Sheri L. Johnson
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  3. June Gruber
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Correspondence to June Gruber.

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Devlin, H.C., Johnson, S.L. & Gruber, J. Feeling Good and Taking a Chance? Associations of Hypomania Risk with Cognitive and Behavioral Risk Taking. Cogn Ther Res 39, 473–479 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-015-9679-3

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