As long as the balloon doesn’t pop

One of the first SELS students, Tamara Petrova, got admitted to a Master's program in Europe. This year her Master’s thesis was focused on a very interesting area of neuroeconomics, which is still quite rare in Russia. Tamara has told us about her research and her reasons for choosing this unusual field.

“I’ve graduated from my Bachelor's and Master's programs in sociology at the HSE in St. Petersburg and done some research in SELS; after this experience I’ve decided to try myself in marketing research. I wanted to investigate the usage of quantitative methods of data analysis in real life studies of human behavior as consumers. When the company I worked for decided to participate in the ESOMAR conference, I got a task to examine information on over 800 other participant companies. My attention got attracted to companies involved in neuromarketing research, and, specifically, research on emotional and behavioral reactions of the buyers to certain goods, promotional events, market prices, etc., in terms of marketing, cognitive psychology and neurophysiology.And this became an impetus for me to select my future research specialty. After a while, when I got already enrolled in the Master's program in Neuroeconomics at the University of Maastricht (the Netherlands), I plunged into reading papers on various methods used in this field: fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), EEG (electroencephalography), and others. Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary field. It studies decision making process in situations where a person should choose one of several options that have different levels of uncertainty, risk and reward. In this setting, models of economic behavior get integrated with neurobiological theories and methods.As an example of neuroeconomic research, I can mention my Master’s thesis, which I was writing at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at the University Hospital RWTH Aachen (Germany) under the supervision of Dr. Ute Habel. Using fMRI, we studied differences in the activity of different brain areas in a risk situation between two groups of patients: patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and a control group of healthy people. In the scientific literature, people with BPD usually are described as impulsive, with a decreased level of activity in the areas of the brain involved in control of behavior and emotions, and an increased level of activity in the limbic system. Among other things, this system controls development of motivations and emotions. We presented the risk situation as the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), which was originally developed by the American psychologist Lejuez and his colleagues. The participants were presented a “balloon” on a screen, and they were given an opportunity to “pump” the balloon by clicking a button. With each click, the pump inflates the balloon, and the monetary reward increases as the balloon gets larger. But at some point the balloon will pop, and all the money “won” in the current round will be lost. To prevent the loss, the subject should press the "Save money" button at some point, before the balloon pops; in this case the earned money will be transferred to a "permanent bank". Subjects don’t know at which click the balloon might explode. The balloon can be inflated up to 12 times, but the programmed number of maximum clicks is different for each balloon. This task also contains a control condition: there are also balloons of a different color that don’t give money when they get pumped; the participants get warned about this in advance. The balloons of different color appear on the screen in a pseudo-random order, following a certain algorithm, which is identical for each participant.                     According to numerous studies, one of the advantages of the BART is that it shows a positive correlation between a greater risk-taking propensity revealed in this test, on the one hand, and a display of risk behavior in real life, such as alcohol abuse, unprotected sex, extreme driving, etc., on the other hand. In addition, the BART is designed in such a way that the level of risk increases in accordance with the result of decisions made by the subject during this test. Also, the risk level is considered in this model as a separate variable. This makes it possible to use it as a covariate, which is independent from other components of the experiment.We expected that patients with BPS would take risk more often, and they would be more likely to lose money than participants from the control group. Contrary to our expectations, our preliminary results have shown that, on the average, both groups were equally inclined to avoid losses, learn from mistakes, and try to develop optimal strategies. Perhaps this result is connected to the observation that, as risks were getting higher, the BPD patients tried to control their behavior as much as possible and refrain from impulsive reactions, which was confirmed by our analysis of their brain activity. This made them different from the control group. On the other hand, during the process of making a choice between inflating the balloon further or saving the money, subjects from both groups were engaging the same brain structures. It was a pilot research, and our sample size wasn’t sufficiently large, and for this reason at this stage our results should be taken as assumptions that need further testing.”Tamara plans to continue her research in this area. And we expect to hear more about her studies and read her research papers in the future!