Interactions between acute stress and financial decision-making

Day-to-day decision-making is susceptible to various demands exerted by the environment. At times, such demands can lead to stressful conditions, affecting both psychological and physiological states. In order for researchers to understand how to control stressful conditions while making informed goal-oriented decisions, a necessary first step is to probe the interaction between the state created by exposure to acute stress and how decisions are performed under those conditions. To that end, the goal of this dissertation is to elucidate the effects of acute stress on decision-making at both the behavioral and neural levels. This will be accomplished by focusing on three aspects of the relationship between stress and decision-making. First, the question of how acute stress alters financial decisions during a financial decision-making task similar to those used in the fields of neuroeconomics will be addressed. The second will be an examination of whether or not the effects of acute stress generalize to other types of more automatized decision-making tasks -- in this case, a task involving instrumental conditioning. Finally, the neural systems underlying the potential interaction between acute stress and financial decision-making will be considered.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-115)by Anthony J. Porcell