Haj-Ali, Hadeel;
Glickman, Moshe;
Sharot, Tali;
(2025)
Escalating risk-taking is linked to emotional habituation.
Communications Psychology
, 3
, Article 139. 10.1038/s44271-025-00319-1.
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Abstract
Anecdotally, excessive risk-taking can be traced back to minor acts that escalated gradually. What leads to risk-taking escalation and why is escalation fast in some individuals, but not in others? Here, over three experiments (NMain Experiment = 160, NValidation Experiment = 35, NControl Experiment = 30), we used Virtual Reality to simulate physical risk by having participants walk on a virtual plank suspended in midair. We demonstrate that with repeated opportunities to engage in such risk, emotional responses habituate and risk-taking escalates. The rate of escalation differed dramatically across individuals. We found no credible evidence that individuals' baseline emotions or trait anxiety predicted risk escalation. Instead, the key was how fast anxiety and excitement declined. Individuals who reported faster reduction of anxiety or excitement tended to take more risk over time. The findings may help to identify individuals prone to risk-taking escalation and to develop tools that restore emotions to reduce fatal risk-taking.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Escalating risk-taking is linked to emotional habituation |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s44271-025-00319-1 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00319-1 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215043 |
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