Risk-Taking Behavior Under the Effect of Emotional Stimuli Among Children and Adults

Risk-taking has an important role in human’s life, either positive or negative. Thus, finding a method to control or drive this in a particular way could affect individuals and communities’ health by discouraging negative risks such as reckless driving or encouraging positive risks. Emotion induction is one of the methods that can enhance or reinforce risk-taking according to the perceived emotion. Among the studies which had taken, most of them focus on adolescents’ which is known as the peaked age of risk-taking behavior, while from a developmental learning point of view if there is a way to control or educate people’s behavior childhood could be the best time. Thus, this study along with the introduction of a new risk-taking task, aims to investigate two less studied groups (children and adults) risk-taking behavior, and also their behavioral response after they influence by positive or negative emotional pictures, to test whether these affect their risk-taking or not. 21 children and 20 adults participate in this experiment. Their risk-taking behavior is obtained using a new version of game of dice task combined with emotional stimuli. Results show that children have higher tendency to choose riskier options while they affected by positive emotion while adults are more risk-averse after primed by negative emotion. These findings could be helpful for policy makers and tutoring planners to control risk-taking behavior over different ages using priming effect of positive and negative emotions.