Blain Bastien, Globig Laura K, Sharot Tali
Affective Brain Lab, Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, WC1H 0AP UK.
Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, University College London, London, UK.
J Risk Uncertain. 2025;71(1):93-109. doi: 10.1007/s11166-025-09453-x. Epub 2025 Jun 20.
A critical optimization problem is how to distribute resource consumption over time. Humans tend to value immediate rewards over equivalent future rewards-a phenomenon called temporal discounting. Such imbalance can lead to poor health, education, and financial decisions. It is also a hurdle for implementing sustainability policies. A major research goal is to identify factors that influence temporal discounting, so that policymakers could develop interventions to correct for this imbalance. One such factor is available resources; scarcity may increase in temporal discounting. Another potential factor is emotion; negative emotions may lead to high temporal discounting. However, emotion and resources are not independent. For example, losing a large sum of money will lead to negative affect. Here, we take advantage of one of the largest global 'income shocks' in history, to tease apart the role of emotion and income on temporal discounting. We tested 1,145 individuals as the market was crashing in late March 2020 and unemployment rising and then retested 200 of those individuals as the market was recovering in June 2020. We found that income shock was strongly related to an increase in delay discounting using cross-sectional and longitudinal data. Importantly, this relationship was independent of the negative impact on affect. These findings suggest that, contrary to wide held assumptions, people directly adapt delay discounting to environmental constraints, without the need for input from the affective system. This independence may be adaptive, as affect is a noisy reflection of environmental constraints, which may lead to suboptimal choice.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11166-025-09453-x.
一个关键的优化问题是如何随时间分配资源消耗。人类倾向于重视即时奖励而非同等的未来奖励——这种现象被称为时间贴现。这种失衡可能导致健康、教育和财务决策不佳。它也是实施可持续发展政策的一个障碍。一个主要的研究目标是确定影响时间贴现的因素，以便政策制定者能够制定干预措施来纠正这种失衡。其中一个因素是可用资源；稀缺可能会增加时间贴现。另一个潜在因素是情绪；负面情绪可能导致高时间贴现。然而，情绪和资源并非相互独立。例如，损失一大笔钱会导致负面影响。在这里，我们利用历史上最大的全球“收入冲击”之一，来区分情绪和收入在时间贴现上的作用。在2020年3月下旬市场暴跌且失业率上升时，我们对1145人进行了测试，然后在2020年6月市场复苏时对其中200人进行了重新测试。我们发现，使用横断面数据和纵向数据，收入冲击与延迟贴现的增加密切相关。重要的是，这种关系独立于对情绪的负面影响。这些发现表明，与广泛持有的假设相反，人们直接根据环境限制调整延迟贴现，而无需情感系统的输入。这种独立性可能是适应性的，因为情绪是环境限制的嘈杂反映，这可能导致次优选择。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s11166-025-09453-x获取的补充材料。
