Dax My Heart Hurts Instrumental Download

To dissociate information from its instrumental utility, and to investigate its intrinsic value more directly, we have developed a type of paradigm in which participants can choose to obtain non-instrumental information about the outcome of a series of predetermined lotteries. This information only immediately reveals how much has been won, but it cannot be used to change the odds. Using variations of this paradigm, we have shown that to obtain this information participants are willing to sacrifice substantial proportions of their potential winnings10,11,12, pay small amounts of money13, invest physical effort14, and even endure physical pain15.

Taken together, research on non-instrumental information-seeking has led to the suggestion that information itself might be valuable, i.e. that information is intrinsically rewarding, beyond its instrumental utility e.g.,3,16,17. In support of this interpretation, neural signals for information prediction-errors and the subjective value of information have been found to resemble reward-related signals in monkeys18,19,20 and humans8,12,14; for a review see21.

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It is likely that the reason for why humans value non-instrumental information lies in the purpose that is fulfills. In the case of our lottery tasks, modelling results from several studies strongly suggested that the value of obtaining non-instrumental information is related to the reduction of uncertainty10,11,14. The presence of non-instrumental information has been shown to directly increase risk-taking in a gambling task, simply because it reduces uncertainty earlier22. Higher anxiety and negative affect, but not the personality traits Openness/Intellect, have been shown to increase the willingness to pay for this information11,23. The finding that participants are also willing to pay with pain for non-instrumental information15 further suggests that the uncertainty of not knowing might be sufficiently aversive that its termination is sometimes worth accepting a physically aversive state in return. In sum, these findings suggest a strong desire to reduce uncertainty, even though the uncertainty of not knowing the outcome of insignificant lotteries has no real relevance either.

In this study, we asked whether acute stress modulates non-instrumental information-seeking behaviour. This allowed us to test how stable information valuation (and the respective desire to reduce uncertainty) is. It has been shown that under acute stress, cognitive and emotional processing substantially changes, which includes attention, cognitive control, learning, memory, risk-taking, decision-making, reward processing, and goal-directed behaviour24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32. In general, stress is causing people to shift to cognitively less-demanding strategies33,34. One hypothesis is therefore that acute stress triggers a redirection of recourses away from unnecessarily demanding cognitive processes, which in turn should reduce the importance of the uncertainty of not knowing the outcome of the lotteries. This means, acute stress should reduce the willingness to pay for non-instrumental information. The alternative hypothesis is that, because acute stress is reliably associated with negative affect35, and negative affect has been linked to increased information-seeking11, the salience of uncertainty, including those of the lottery outcomes, might increase. In consequence, participants should be willing to pay more for non-instrumental information. Contrary to both hypotheses, a recent study has experimentally induced state anxiety and has found that there was no effect on information-seeking behaviour in a task comparable to ours in which participants could receive updates on a stock market portfolio6. The final hypothesis is therefore that, despite the link between stress and state anxiety, the desire to reduce uncertainty might not be affected by acute stress. Such a finding would suggest that the aversive experience of not knowing is sufficiently stable and not easily modifiable by the situational context. In this case, there should be no modulation of the willingness to pay for non-instrumental information.

In this study, we exposed one group of participants to the SECPT while another group received a non-stressful control treatment, which consisted of holding their hand in pleasantly warm water without social evaluation35. Following this, we administered an established and sensitive information-seeking task in which participants observed a series of predetermined coin-flip lotteries15. In each trial, both sides of the coin were associated with point values, which were later converted into monetary rewards. The mapping between values and sides of the coin, however, were hidden, meaning that while participants knew that all winnings were always added to their total, the exact amount (i.e. the points) were not revealed immediately. Importantly, because the lotteries were predetermined, and knowing the mapping of values to the sides of the coin could not change the outcome, this information was non-instrumental. Participants could nevertheless bid small amounts of money for learning the outcome in each trial immediately. The amount they were willing to pay served as a direct measure for the subjective value they assigned to obtaining this information13,15. As in previous work15, we varied the expected value of the lotteries between trials, i.e. how much was at stake on average, as well as the range between values associated with each side of the coin, as these variables have been shown to systematically modulate the perceived importance of the lottery8. Our main research aim was to test whether being in a state of acute stress modulated information-seeking behaviour in line with one of the hypotheses outlined above.

Physiological measures 2 While participants were still seated, the experimenter repeated the measurements of heart rate, blood pressure and took another saliva sample to measure cortisol levels.

To verify that the stress induction was successful, we conducted an ANOVA for the saliva cortisol concentration [g/dL] with the repeated-measures factor Timepoint (pre-induction, post-induction, post-experiment) and the between-groups factor Stress Group (SECPT condition, control condition). Given the typical time course of cortisol responses, we expected a successful stress response to be reflected by a significant increase in cortisol concentration measured post-experimentally (timepoint 3) in the SECPT condition only35. Additional secondary control ANOVAs were conducted for heart rate, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure, again with the repeated-measures factor Timepoint and the between-groups factor Stress Group.

(A) Mean bid for non-instrumental information increased as a function of Expected Value of the lottery (i.e. the average reward of both sides of the coin). No differences between the control condition (left panel) and the SECPT condition (right panel) were found; (B) Mean bid for non-instrumental information increased as a function of Range (i.e. difference between reward values of both sides of the coin). No differences between the control condition (left panel) and the SECPT condition (right panel) were found.

In this study, we used an established coin flip lottery task13,15 to investigate whether non-instrumental information-seeking behaviour was altered under acute stress. In each trial, participants could bid for receiving information about the mapping of point values to the two sides of the coin, which ultimately provided them with information about the outcome of the lottery; but this information could not be used to change the odds of the lottery, and they always won the amount associated with the winning side. Before performing the task, participants either experienced acute stress induced by the Socially Evaluated Cold Pressor Test (SECPT), which required them to keep their hand in ice-cold water for three minutes while being observed by an experimenter, or they did not experience stress in a control condition, which only required them to keep their hand in pleasantly warm water for the same period. We measured cortisol responses through a series of saliva samples, which showed that the stress induction was successful. Our results demonstrated that there was no modification of information-seeking behaviour in the stress condition. Both the expected value of the lottery as well as the range between available amounts moderated information-seeking; however, these moderation effects did not differ between groups.

Our results do not rule out that information-seeking could indeed be modulated by other forms of stress, a prolonged experience of stress, or higher levels of stress intensity. In some of these scenarios, significantly higher levels of state anxiety might be induced, or a stronger redirection of cognitive resources might result, which could potentially modulate information-seeking. However, we are generally confident that the SECPT procedure itself is a valid way to induce stress, as an evaluation of multiple studies showed that the SECPT is reliably experienced as stressful, painful, unpleasant, and difficult35. It has also been shown to consistently modify other processes across several cognitive domains, including attention, learning, memory, risk-taking, and goal-directed action26,28,29,30,31,32. The elevated levels of cortisol35, which were clearly still evident after completion of the information-seeking task, strongly suggest that participants in the SECPT condition were indeed stressed during the information-seeking task. This was confirmed by significant differences in subjective stress ratings between experimental conditions that we acquired for a part of our samples. Crucially, cortisol has been suggested to be the main driver of stress effects on emotion and cognition26,34,35. While we did not observe a modulation of heart rate or blood pressure, this was most likely due to our choice of measurement timepoints, as both measures have been reported to be maximal during the SECPT procedure and return to baseline quickly directly afterwards35. 006ab0faaa