The role of stress neuromodulators in decision making under risk

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Radoslaw Martin Cichy, since 6/2022; Professorin Dr. Katja Wingenfeld
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 411484810

Incidental affective states, i.e., affective states that are unrelated to the decision at hand, can influence decision making. Acute stress is such an affective state and is a powerful contextual modulator of decision-making processes. It appeared that after stress exposure, individuals make riskier decisions.In terms of physiological and neurohormonal changes, the stress response has been well characterized: Exposure to stress elicits an array of autonomic, endocrine, and behavioral responses. The physiological stress response is mediated by the hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis and the locus coeruleus noradrenergic (LC-NA) system with cortisol and norepinephrine (NE) as their end products. There is compelling evidence that the stress hormones cortisol and NE influence cognitive processes. However, only very few studies so far used pharmacological approaches to specify the role of stress neuromodulators on decision making and these studies are hardly comparable due to differences in the experimental design, e.g., the decision making task used. Furthermore, the neural underpinnings of stress effects on decision making are uninvestigated so far.Thus, studies are needed which 1) systematically differentiate the effects of the most important stress neuromodulators NE and cortisol, and 2) use tasks that differentiate different decision making processes, such as risk attitude and loss aversion to disentangle potentially different effects of these neuromodulators and their neural correlates.The aim of the proposed project is to clarify the role of the major stress neuromodulators, NE and cortisol, in their contribution to different processes related to decision making under risk. To this end, we will combine precise pharmacological stimulation, behavioral modeling, and fMRI methods to systematically disentangle the effects of stress hormones on risk attitudes and loss aversion as well as their relation to neural correlates of processing subjective value and risk. Our research program comprises two studies. In study 1, we will examine the role of noradrenergic activation and blockade on decision making under risk at the behavioral, computational, and neural level. In study 2, we will use a similar approach to investigate the effects of cortisol with and without additional noradrenergic activation on decision making under risk.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Hauke Reiner Heekeren, until 5/2022