Risky Business: Stressed Men, But Not Stressed Women, More Likely To Gamble And Takes Risks

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630202123.htm

ScienceDaily (July 1, 2009) — Stressed out, dude? Don't go to Vegas.

New research, to be published July 1 in the journal PLoS One, shows that men under stress may be more likely to take risks, correlating to such real-life behavior as gambling, smoking, unsafe sex and illegal drug use.
In contrast, stressed women moderate their behavior and may be less likely to make risky choices, the study found.
"Evolutionarily speaking, it's perhaps more beneficial for men to be aggressive in stressful, high-arousal situations when risk and reward are involved," said Nichole Lighthall of the University of Southern California Davis School of Gerontology and lead author of the paper. "Applied to financial risk taking, it's akin to competition for territory or other valuable resources."
The researchers asked participants to play a game called the Balloon Analogue Risk Task in which inflating a balloon earns money (five cents per pump). Participants were told that they could cash out their earnings by clicking a "Collect $$$" button at any point in the game.
However, the balloon would explode if it was inflated beyond its randomly determined breakpoint. All winnings for exploded balloons would be lost.
"One valuable aspect of the [balloon task] is its predictive validity for real-world impulsivity," Lighthall explained. "Some risk taking was necessary to make gains, but excessive risk was associated with diminishing returns. If you always clicked and never cashed out, you would lose every time."
The balloon task has been previously used to assess tolerance for risky behavior among inner-city adolescents and substance abusers, among others.
"Obviously, there are situations in the real world where risky behavior would not be beneficial," Lighthall said. "Sometimes being conservative, thoughtful and taking it slow are good things."
In the control group, men and women displayed statistically similar levels of risk taking, inflating the balloon about 40 times on average.
However, women in the stressed group only inflated the balloon an average of 32 times – more than 30 percent less often than their stressed male counterparts, who inflated the balloon an average of 48 times.
"Men seem to enter more risky financial situations than women, which was part of the impetus for our study," Lighthall said. "But only in the stressed condition did we see any statistical differences in risky behavior between men and women."
Stressful experiences have been shown to stimulate the release of cortisol, commonly known as the "stress hormone." Participants randomly assigned to the stress group held a hand in ice-cold water, which raised cortisol levels, particularly among female participants. No participants were using hormone birth control.
According to Lighthall, future research might use neuroimaging to explore how the brain processes stress or examine whether psychological stress, such as anticipating giving a speech, would yield similar results as the physical stress manipulation used in this study.
Mara Mather, director of the Emotion and Cognition Lab at USC and associate professor of psychology and gerontology at the USC Davis School of Gerontology, and Marissa Gorlick, also of the USC Davis School of Gerontology, were co-authors of the study.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Southern California, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

The Dark Side Of Gifts: Feeling Indebted May Drive People To The Marketplace

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090615171632.htm

ScienceDaily (June 17, 2009) — You need to move out of your apartment. Do you call in your friends and family to haul boxes and furniture or contact a moving company? A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that sometimes the emotions connected with asking for favors can actually drive people to the market.

According to the study's author, Jean-Sébastien Marcoux (HEC Montréal), many researchers romanticize gift-giving. "They praise it for humanizing market relationships, for making the market meaningful, and for providing an escape from the commodifying logic of capitalist exchanges," Marcoux writes. Other researchers have examined the dark side of gift giving: the troublesome feelings that arise from social indebtedness. But Marcoux's research examines how feelings of perpetual obligation affect people's attitudes toward the market.
Marcoux conducted a ten-year (1997-2007) ethnographic study in Montréal on moving. His methods involved interviews, observations, photography, and even moving furniture. He chose to study moving because it's an act that can involve the market, the "gift economy," or both. "Moving is a social event particularly favorable to the emergence of reciprocal relations," writes Marcoux. "Moreover, many people who move use both the gift economy and the market to do so."
By studying moving, Marcoux got an in-depth look at people who were often in the midst of traumatic life events, such as divorce, job loss, separation, or death of a loved one. Marcoux found that the guilt and obligation connected with asking for help from family and friends often drove people to seek the simpler transactions of the marketplace.
"It is important to recognize that withholding requests for gifts, services, and favors from significant others can be a driving force for using the market," writes Marcoux. "People use the market to free themselves from the straitjacket of social expectations—from the sense of indebtedness and emotional oppression—which constrains them in their reciprocity relations inside the gift economy," Marcoux concludes.
Journal reference:
Jean-Sébastien Marcoux. Escaping the Gift Economy. Journal of Consumer Research, 2009; 090603081616048 DOI: 10.1086/600485