Authors
Heike Anderson-Schmidt, Linda Gebel, Thomas G Schulze, Andreas Glöckner
Description
Impaired decision-making is often seen in patients with bipolar disorder (BD) and increased risk-taking behaviour (eg driving too fast, gambling, going on spending sprees, engaging in unprotected sex) is listed among the diagnostic criteria for mania (APA, 2000). Despite the fact that this type of behaviour can have dire consequences for both patients and their families, surprisingly little research has been carried out in this field. Chandler et al.(2009) and Christodoulou et al.(2006) reported altered risk-aversion and risk-seeking behaviour in decision-making tasks in patients with BD compared to healthy controls (HC). This change appears to be irrespective of clinical state (Adida et al., 2011), thus fulfilling one of the criteria for an endophenotype. There is actually some evidence from genetic studies (Hidiruglu et al., 2013) to suggest that risk-taking behaviour may be a useful endophenotype to study in BD. However, most studies only focus on one aspect of decision-making and do not reflect real-life situations. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate different aspects of real-life decision-making (risk aversion, loss aversion and sensitivity towards probabilities) in patients with BD and to compare them to HC on the basis of Cumulative Prospect Theory (Tversky & Kahneman, 1992). Furthermore, we examined whether risk-taking behaviour in BD patients is different in a medical than a financial scenario).
Scholar articles