Drawing upon the cultural risk perspective and writings on risk taking, this paper seeks to develop ideas relating to the effective use of school cyberspace. It is argued that some individuals respond to exaggerated, yet seductive, discourses of online risks by over-blocking, unreasonably restricting students’ Internet activity. At the same time, there are sensible, even compelling, motivations...

Human risk taking is characterized by a large amount of individual heterogeneity. In this study, we applied resting-state electroencephalography, which captures stable individual differences in neural activity, before subjects performed a risk-taking task. Using a source-localization technique, we found that the baseline cortical activity in the right prefrontal cortex predicts individual risk-...

Risk-taking is subject to considerable individual differences. In the current study, we tested whether resting-state activity in the prefrontal cortex and trait sensitivity to reward and punishment can help predict risk-taking behavior. Prefrontal activity at rest was assessed in seventy healthy volunteers using electroencephalography, and compared to their choice behavior on an economic risk-t...

This paper develops an experimental approach to understanding how construction workers modify their risk taking behavior when safety schemes are implemented. The study takes a qualitative approach using (1) repertory grid techniques to map attitudinal change and (2) navigable movies to reproduce the experience of surrogate travel. Hazard categories emerged from the data to produce a framework w...

This article models the cognitive processes underlying learning and sequential choice in a risk-taking task for the purposes of understanding how they occur in this moderately complex environment and how behavior in it relates to self-reported real-world risk taking. The best stochastic model assumes that participants incorrectly treat outcome probabilities as stationary, update probabilities i...

Affect can have a significant influence on decision-making processes and subsequent choice. One particularly relevant type of negative affect is anxiety, which serves to enhance responses to threatening stimuli or situations. In its exaggerated form, it can lead to psychiatric disorders, with detrimental consequences for quality of life, including the ability to make choices. This study investi...

STUDY OBJECTIVES This study examined the effects of ethanol, caffeine, and basal sleepiness on a laboratory measure of risk-taking behavior, the Stop Light Task. The aims were to determine whether sleepiness and ethanol degrade psychomotor speed and risky choice and whether caffeine attenuates these effects. DESIGN Mixed design with participants chosen for basal level of sleepiness and each a...