In daily life, we are not always successful in reaching our goals. For example, if we go to the casino and lose at the slot machine, it might make us feel as if we want to hit the spin button really hard. Other times, we take a pause to consider our next options #thesisThread 1/7
I work on how people react to these failures to reach their goals. What determines whether we want to act rashly (what we think is being impulsive)?
Are there situations that cause rash actions in all of us or does it only happen for people that we would consider ‘impulsive’? 2/7
Are there situations that cause rash actions in all of us or does it only happen for people that we would consider ‘impulsive’? 2/7
This is what we know: if people can actively change the outcome to their advantage, they might slow down, maybe consider their options. But if their actions have no influence on the outcome, they act very fast without much consideration (and not always with the best choice) 3/7
For example, I looked at gambling where people usually have no direct control over the outcome (as it is a game of chance), and I could see that people choose to gamble more often and faster after losing money than after winning money. 4/7
But when participants have actual control over the outcome (for instance when they must judge whether a number is odd or even) they slow down after making an error. So contextual information plays an important role in triggering impulsive actions. 5/7
One last question I address in the last study of my PhD, is whether everybody acts rashly after not reaching their goals and to what extent this is related to personality differences in impulsivity 6/7
These insights from the healthy population can be used in clinical research to help us better understand impulsivity as underlying psychological disorders. @ugent @cobe_lab #scicomm 7/7
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