title: Investment behavior and the negative side of emotion.
abstract: Can dysfunction in neural systems subserving emotion lead, under certain circumstances, to more advantageous decisions? To answer this question, we investigated how normal participants, patients with stable focal lesions in brain regions related to emotion (target patients), and patients with stable focal lesions in brain regions unrelated to emotion (control patients) made 20 rounds of investment decisions. Target patients made more advantageous decisions and ultimately earned more money from their investments than the normal participants and control patients. When normal participants and control patients either won or lost money on an investment round, they adopted a conservative strategy and became more reluctant to invest on the subsequent round; these results suggest that they were more affected than target patients by the outcomes of decisions made in the previous rounds.
authors.affiliation: Stanford University, CA 94305-5015, USA. shiv_baba@gsb.stanford.edu
authors.forename: Baba
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Shiv
authors.forename: George
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Loewenstein
authors.forename: Antoine
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bechara
authors.forename: Hanna
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Damasio
authors.forename: Antonio R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Damasio
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D000679:Amygdala / Q000502:physiology*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007449:Investments / Q000191:economics*; D016015:Logistic Models; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D013003:Somatosensory Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires