Jung Wi Hoon
Department of Psychology, Gachon University, 1342 Seongnam-daero, Seongnam, 13120, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.
Heliyon. 2024 Aug 6;10(15):e35873. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e35873. eCollection 2024 Aug 15.
Individuals differ substantially in their degree of acceptance of risks, referred to as risk tolerance, and these differences are associated with real-life outcomes such as risky health-related behaviors. While previous studies have identified brain regions that are functionally associated with individual risk tolerance, little is known about the relationship between individual risk tolerance and whole-brain functional organization.
This study investigated whether the topological properties of individual functional brain networks in healthy young adults (n = 67) are associated with individual risk tolerance using resting-state fMRI data in conjunction with a graph theoretical analysis approach.
The analysis revealed that individual risk tolerance was positively associated with global topological properties, including the normalized clustering coefficient and small-worldness, which represent the degree of information segregation and the balance between information segregation and integration in a network, respectively. Additionally, individuals with higher risk tolerance exhibited greater centrality in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which is associated with the subjective value of the available options.
These results extend our understanding of how individual differences in risk tolerance, especially in young adults, are associated with functional brain organization, particularly regarding the balance between segregation and integration in functional networks, and highlight the important role of the connections between the vmPFC and the rest of the brain in the functional networks in relation to risk tolerance.
个体在对风险的接受程度（即风险承受力）上存在很大差异，这些差异与诸如危险的健康相关行为等现实生活结果相关。虽然先前的研究已经确定了与个体风险承受力在功能上相关的脑区，但对于个体风险承受力与全脑功能组织之间的关系却知之甚少。
本研究使用静息态功能磁共振成像数据并结合图论分析方法，调查了健康年轻成年人（n = 67）个体功能脑网络的拓扑特性是否与个体风险承受力相关。
分析表明，个体风险承受力与全局拓扑特性呈正相关，包括归一化聚类系数和小世界特性，它们分别代表网络中信息隔离的程度以及信息隔离与整合之间的平衡。此外，风险承受力较高的个体在腹内侧前额叶皮层（vmPFC）表现出更高的中心性，该脑区与可用选项的主观价值相关。
这些结果扩展了我们对于风险承受力个体差异（尤其是在年轻成年人中）如何与功能脑组织结构相关的理解，特别是关于功能网络中隔离与整合之间的平衡，并突出了腹内侧前额叶皮层与大脑其他部分之间的连接在与风险承受力相关的功能网络中的重要作用。
