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The uncertainty appraisal enhances the prominent deck B effect in the Iowa gambling task

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Abstract

The Iowa gambling task (Bechara et al., Cognition 50:7–15, 1994) is designed to simulate a decision making problem under ambiguity, in which the degree of reliance on emotional cues arising from previous experiences contributes to perform advantageously. Recent studies based on the appraisal tendency framework demonstrated that emotional certainty (associated with intuitive strategies) leads to a more advantageous decision pattern, whereas emotional uncertainty (associated with deliberative strategies) impairs the performance in the IGT (Bagneux et al., Motivation and Emotion 37(4):818–827, 2013; Bollon and Bagneux, Cognition and Emotion 27(2):376–384, 2013). Due to the problems in the IGT (Dunn et al., Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 30:239–271, 2006; Steingroever et al., Psychological Assessment 25(1):180–193, 2013), however, it is an open question to what extent the disadvantageous IGT performance in the uncertainty conditions was based on risky decision making. Addressing the main criticisms on the IGT, the primary aim of the present study is to provide a further explanation for the underlying source of the IGT impairment led by uncertainty appraisals. In line with previous research, we found that participants in the certainty-associated emotion condition (disgust) outperformed those in uncertainty-associated conditions (fear, sadness) in the gambling game. Detailed four-deck format analyses on decision patterns and knowledge levels provided supporting evidence for our main hypothesis that the weak IGT scores in the uncertainty conditions can be summarized as a failure to anticipate the badness and the goodness of the most difficult decks, and a dominant preference for a risky option with high immediate gains and infrequent losses.

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Notes

  1. Researchers argue that there are two types of emotional influences: incidental and integral. Integral emotions are experienced in relation to the target stimulus or event (e.g., fear in response to a snake in the grass), whereas incidental emotions occur via carryover effect, when the source is unrelated to the eliciting cause of the emotion (e.g., perceiving people as more friendly in a sunny day) (see Blanchette and Richards 2010; Lerner et al. 2015; Pham 2007 for reviews).

  2. The somatic marker hypothesis (the SMH, Damasio 1994) proposes that the ability to sense simply means to rely on the biasing ‘somatic markers’ from the body, the affective reactions associated with the outcomes of previous mistakes. These markers, overtly or covertly, signal the occurrence of a potential bad outcome and prevent players from making a selection from bad options.

  3. Previous ATF-related studies (Bagneux et al. 2013; Bollon and Bagneux 2013) demonstrated that the scene from the movie City of Angels (1998) induces uncertainty-associated sadness. However, the preliminary results of our ongoing project named “Assessing the Emotion Eliciting Levels of Film Clips in Turkish Sample and Developing of a Standard Stimulus Set” suggested that the scene from City of Angels was not an effective stimulus to elicit sadness intensely. Instead of this film clip, we decided to use the scene from the movie the Champ (1979), which has a similar main theme with City of Angels (sudden loss of a beloved one). Similarly, we could not use the scene from the movie the Blair Witch Project (1999), since it was not effective to induce feelings of fear in Turkish sample. Thus, we preferred to use a different popular category of horror to induce fear. We conducted several preliminary studies to test these three film clips (i.e., Trainspotting, Paranormal Activity, and the Champ) and confirmed the effectiveness of these stimuli to induce our target emotions intensely and discretely.

  4. We included two additional instructions: (1) Participants were specifically instructed that the game was definitely not a game of luck and that therefore random selection was not a good strategy. (2) We also included an experiential motive as used in the study of Bollon and Bagneux (2013), instructing participants that they would receive feedback about their reasoning abilities at the end of the game.

  5. The analyses on the responses given to overall evaluation part yielded no significant difference across emotion conditions, F’s < 1.95, and most of the participants in each emotion condition indicated that they have not seen the movie before. For simplicity reasons, we did not include the detailed results of this part.

  6. To follow up this interaction, we also conducted post hoc comparisons for each block separately. The results of these tests with Bonferroni correction showed that the differentiation between emotion conditions approached significance at the end of the game. As compared to those in the disgust condition, participants in the fear condition selected more cards from the disadvantageous deck B in the last two blocks (p’s < .01). Participants in the sadness condition also made a greater number of selections from deck B in Block 5 (p = .079) and Block 6 (p = .010). There was no significant difference between fear and sadness conditions in any of the blocks (p’s > .799).

  7. Two participants’ data were missing for each deck, explaining the difference in degrees of freedom.

  8. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for highlighting the importance of interpretion of the findings in terms of this most recent framework.

  9. We would like thank to the reviewers and the editor for emphasizing these limitations and providing helpful recommendations. Our additional study is based on a within-subjects design, in which 17 independent participants (14 female, M age = 21.15, SD age = 0.90) evaluated each of these three film-clips in terms of different emotional states, (un)certainty appraisals, intensity, and valence (as in our main study), but this time directly at each stimulus offset without delay. In order to assess (un)certainty appraisals, we used three items adapted from the Dimensional Ratings Questionnaire of Smith and Ellsworth (1985): (i) “How well did you understand what was happening around the character in this film clip (e.g., the problem that s/he has encountered and the source of this problem)?" (understanding), (ii) “To what extent did you feel uncertainty regarding your life?” (uncertainty) (iii) "How well could you predict what would happen next in the future?" (prediction) (1 = not at all/11 = completely). We found a significant effect of the type of film clip on the degree of appraisals of understanding, and uncertainty, but not on appraisals of future predictions [understanding: M (SD)disgust = 9.29a (0.41), M (SD)fear = 6.18b (0.81), M (SD)sadness = 9.06a (0.75); uncertainty: M (SD)disgust = 4.00a (0.50), M (SD)fear = 7.47b (0.60), M (SD)sadness = 5.71b (0.72); prediction: M (SD)disgust = 5.77a (0.44), M (SD)fear = 4.18a (0.67), M (SD)sadness = 5.00a, (0.73)]. Note that the results of this study still did not represent the momentary feelings when the film clip is over, rather it refers to the past feelings, i.e. while watching the film clip. Future research can provide a more sensitive measurement of how the emotional state changes step by step as the experiment progresses (e.g., feelings before and after the film clip, the duration of the persistence of the emotional state during the main task).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Aycan Kapucu Eryar, Dr. Osman İyilikci, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. In addition, we would like to thank M. Umut Canoluk for his help in data collection.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Ege University, Izmir, Turkey

    Elvan Arıkan İyilikci & Sonia Amado

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  1. Elvan Arıkan İyilikci
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Correspondence to Elvan Arıkan İyilikci.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee (Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee of the University) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Arıkan İyilikci, E., Amado, S. The uncertainty appraisal enhances the prominent deck B effect in the Iowa gambling task. Motiv Emot 42, 1–16 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-017-9643-5

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