If risk-taking is something you usually avoid, you’re not alone. Most people are twice as sensitive to potential losses than they are to potential gains, which leads to risk aversion. In the Jan. 26 issue of the journal Science, UCLA psychologists present the first neuroscience research comparing how our brains evaluate the possibility of gaining versus losing when making risky decisions.

Researchers using funtional MRI studied brain activity in study participants as they weighed bets, varying the odds and winnings.

“Looking at how your brain responds to potential gains versus potential losses, we can predict how risk-averse you are going to be in your choices,” said study co-author Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology, who holds UCLA’s Wendell Jeffrey and Bernice Wenzel, Term Chair in Behavioral Neuroscience. “Brain activity predicts behavior.”

When we think about possible gain, reward centers in the brain get turned on. However, when weighing potential losses, regions of the brain that process fear and anxiety, such as the amygdala and the insular are not activated.

“What we found instead,” Poldrack said, “is you don’t turn anything up. You turn down the reward areas of the brain, and you turn them down more strongly for losses than you turn them up for gains. Just as people respond more strongly to a $100 potential loss than a $100 potential gain, the brain responds more strongly to a $100 potential loss versus a $100 potential gain.”

Read the full press release:
How Does Your Brain Respond When You Think about Gambling or Taking Risks? UCLA Study Offers New Insights

Scientists studying fear responses in rats have discovered that although the amygdala plays a central role in emotional learning and processes and expresses fear, a region of the cortex may be involved in learned fear.

By teaching rats to fear a tone by associating it with a shock to the foot at the end of the tone, scientists were able to observe the rats’ response. Ater learning to fear the tone, the rats would spend 70% percent of the time the tone sounded in a frozen state, a typical fear response.

When the researchers chemically blocked activity in the prelimbic cortex, located near the front of the brain, the rats spent only 14% of the time frozen. However, their innate fears were not affected by the blocking of the prelimbic cortex, they still exhibited fear at the sight of a cat or a large open area.

The findings suggest that hyperactivity in that region of the prefrontal cortex might contribute to learned fear disorders in humans, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety disorders.

The study was authored by Kevin A. Corcoran, PhD, and Gregory Quirk, PhD, of the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico. Their report appears in the January 24 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.