When and how do people take risks to get rewards?

The Gambling Task can be used to explore the relationship between someone's anxiety and their willingness to engage in risky behavior in uncertain situations. The task has a tweakable number of trials (e.g., 60 trials) and a tweakable number of starting points that a participant can gamble. The task can be used to explore relationships between willingness to take risks and variables like gender, social influence (e.g., how does the perceived influence of others impact someone's risk behavior), or the stroop or flanker task (e.g., how does attention or cognitive control related to decisions in uncertain situations). Past research suggests that anxious individuals tend to avoid risks—even when potential rewards are at stake—without showing an increased sensitivity to potential losses (Charpentier et al., 2017).

Resources:

• Charpentier, C. J., Aylward, J., Roiser, J. P., & Robinson, O. J. (2017). Enhanced risk aversion, but not loss aversion, in unmedicated pathological anxiety. Biological Psychiatry, 81(12), 1014-1022.
• Brown, V. M., Price, R., & Dombrovski, A. Y. (2023). Anxiety as a disorder of uncertainty: implications for understanding maladaptive anxiety, anxious avoidance, and exposure therapy. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 23(3), 844–868. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-023-01080-w
• Gatzke-Kopp, L. M., Ram, N., Lydon-Staley, D. M., & DuPuis, D. (2018). Children’s sensitivity to cost and reward in decision making across distinct domains of probability, effort, and delay. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 31(1), 12–24. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.2038

Parameters
The following features can be tweaked (default values shown after colon):

• randomize: yes
• question: How happy are you right now?
• min_rating_label: Very unhappy
• max_rating_label: Very happy
• welcome_text: See how good you are at making decisions by winning as many points as you can. At the same time, help scientists study happiness by reporting how you feel during the game.
• starting_points: 500
• instructions_question: Help us study happiness. When asked how you feel, move the slider to the right when you feel happy and to the left when you feel unhappy. Mark exactly how you feel at that moment.
• whenShowQuestion: 5
• numberOfTrials: 20
• language: english (English, Spanish, Chinese)

Disclaimer
Any languages that are currently offered besides English for this survey are not necessarily validated translations. This survey was translated using Google Translate and verified by members of the community.
What data is collected? How is it scored?
The following variables are recorded:

• gamble_percentage_gain: Higher percentages indicate that participants more frequently chose to gamble in the gain condition, where they could win a large number of points (e.g., 51) or a smaller amount (e.g., 30) versus winning nothing (0).
• gamble_percentage_mixed: Higher percentages indicate that participants more frequently chose to gamble in the mixed condition, where they could either win points (e.g., 40), lose points (e.g., -26), or end up with no change (0).
• gamble_percentage_lose: Higher percentages indicate that participants more frequently chose to gamble in the lose condition, where they could gamble on losing nothing (0), lose a large number of points (e.g., -53), or lose a smaller amount (e.g., -26).
• last_score: A higher last score reflects that the participant ended the task with more points, indicating overall success in balancing risk and safe choices throughout the task.
• withinTask_ratings: This variable is a chronological list of the slider responses given by the participant during the task. These ratings can be interpreted as continuous measures of how the participant felt at various points, with higher values reflecting a higher (or more positive) state as defined by the task instructions (e.g., higher score would be higher happiness by default).

Raw data: The raw data consists of the computed percentages for each gambling condition, the final point tally from the task, and the sequence of slider responses captured during the task.


Calculation:
No additional subscores are computed. For the percentage variables, the calculation is:

• gamble_percentage_gain: (Number of gamble choices in the gain condition / Total gain trials) × 100.
• gamble_percentage_mixed: (Number of gamble choices in the mixed condition / Total mixed trials) × 100.
• gamble_percentage_lose: (Number of gamble choices in the lose condition / Total lose trials) × 100.
• last_score and withinTask_ratings are directly recorded from participant responses.