The assumption that losses loom larger than gains is widely used to explain many behavioral phenomena in judgment and decision-making. It is also generally accepted that loss aversion is a stable, traitlike individual difference characterizing people's sensitivity to gains and losses. This interpretation was recently challenged by Walasek and…

Anxiety prepares an organism for dealing with threats by recruiting cognitive resources to process information about the threat, and by engaging physiological systems to prepare a response. Heightened trait anxiety is associated with biases in both these processes: high trait-anxious individuals tend to report heightened risk perceptions, and…

Background: Although reward processing is considered an important part of affective functioning, few studies have investigated reward-related decisions or responses in young people with affective disorders. Depression is postulated to involve decreased activity in reward-related affective systems. Methods: Using functional magnetic resonance…

TWO BASIC NEEDS OF THE DECISIONMAKER ARE IDENTIFIED--THE NEED TO FUNCTION UNDER CONDITIONS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CERTAINTY AND THE NEED TO BE VIGILANT AFTER THE INITIAL DECISION HAS BEEN MADE. PSYCHOLOGICAL CERTAINTY IS DETERMINED BY THE PERSON'S ASSESSMENT OF HIS ENVIRONMENT OR LIFE SPACE AND THE RESOURCES HE HAS AT HIS COMMAND, BOTH OF WHICH ARE…