The Role of Mindfulness and Cardiovascular Reactivity in Economic Risk Taking Behavior
Datum
2018-06
Autor:innen
Haw, Gabriel Gordon
Zeitschriftentitel
ISSN der Zeitschrift
Bandtitel
Verlag
University of Oregon
Zusammenfassung
We all make financial decisions every day, weighing the probabilities of risk and reward in numerous contexts. These decisions occur in ostensibly stressful contexts. One potential mitigator of this stress is mindfulness. Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment. The trait of mindfulness has been linked to reducing risk taking behavior in health contexts by increasing emotional control and regulating the body’s stress response. Mindfulness as a state can be induced in participants with short term guided breathing interventions designed to elicit a calming response in the listener. However, little research has been done on the role of mindfulness interventions on economic risk taking. Furthermore, autonomic processes have been linked to cognition and decision-making, and mindfulness has been shown to alter these systems as well. This study attempts to investigate the intersection of these varied effects of mindfulness. Therefore, this experiment examined two main questions: First, how physiological measures of autonomic function in participants aged 18-35 (n=162) responded to a short-term mindfulness intervention. And second, how well these physiological changes predicted economic risk-taking behavior during the participant’s completion of the Columbia Card Task (CCT), a computerized economic risk-taking assessment. We expected to find that the mindfulness intervention would decrease cardiac stress during the task, and that these changes would explain behavioral differences in risk taking. We found that group of participants randomly assigned to a mindfulness meditation intervention had an increase in high frequency heart rate variability during the task compared to participants randomly assigned to an audiobook control. In addition, risk taking during the task was moderated by the relationship between condition assignment and heart rate reactivity relative to ground.
Beschreibung
67 pages. Presented to the Department of Psychology and the Robert D. Clark Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science June 2018
Schlagwörter
Biochemistry, Psychology, Psychophysiology, Cardiovascular, Mindfulness, Risk, Taking, Behavior, Stress, Inside Out 23287