Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China.
School of Management, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China.
Elife. 2019 Apr 29;8:e45093. doi: 10.7554/eLife.45093.
Dispositional greed, characterized by the insatiable hunger for more and the dissatisfaction for not having enough, has often been associated with heightened impulsivity and excessive risk-taking. Despite its far-reaching implications in social sciences and economics, however, the exact neural mechanisms of how greed personality influences risk-taking are still ill understood. In the present study, we showed the correlation between subject's greed personality trait (GPT) score and risk-taking was selectively mediated by individual's loss aversion, but not risk attitude. In addition, our neuroimaging results indicated that gain and loss prospects were jointly represented in the activities of the ventral striatum and medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC). Furthermore, mOFC responses also encoded the neural loss aversion signal and mediated the association between individual differences in GPT scores and behavioral loss aversion. Our findings provide a basis for understanding the specific neural mechanisms that mediate the effect of greed personality trait on risk-taking behavior.
性格贪婪的人通常表现为对更多东西的贪得无厌和对没有得到足够东西的不满，他们往往具有更高的冲动性和过度冒险倾向。然而，尽管贪婪的性格特质在社会科学和经济学中有广泛的影响，但贪婪的性格特质如何影响冒险行为的确切神经机制仍未被完全理解。在本研究中，我们发现个体的贪婪性格特质（GPT）得分与冒险行为之间的相关性，是通过个体的损失规避而不是风险态度选择性地中介的。此外，我们的神经影像学结果表明，收益和损失的前景共同表现在腹侧纹状体和内侧眶额皮质（mOFC）的活动中。此外，mOFC 的反应还编码了神经损失规避信号，并介导了 GPT 得分个体差异与行为损失规避之间的关联。我们的研究结果为理解介导贪婪性格特质对冒险行为影响的特定神经机制提供了基础。
