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PW01-145 - Neural Correlates Of Assessing Environmental And Technological Hazards

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2020

U. Herwig ,
A. Brühl ,
M.-C. Viebke ,
R.W. Scholz ,
D. Knoch  and
M. Siegrist
U. Herwig
Affiliation:
Clinic for Social and General Psychiatry, Psychiatric University Hospital Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy III, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany
A. Brühl
Affiliation:
Clinic for Social and General Psychiatry, Psychiatric University Hospital Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
M.-C. Viebke
Affiliation:
Clinic for Social and General Psychiatry, Psychiatric University Hospital Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
R.W. Scholz
Affiliation:
Institute for Environmental Decisions, ETH Zürich, Zürich
D. Knoch
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
M. Siegrist
Affiliation:
Institute for Environmental Decisions, ETH Zürich, Zürich

Abstract

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Background

In personal and in political context, we often evaluate the risk of certain conditions. Therefore, two principal psychological approaches are suggested: the analytical consideration and the intuitive estimation, both with according discriminative brain activation. We investigated the neural basis on which non-experts evaluated high risk of different environmental hazards for the society compared with respective low risk.

Methods

Twenty healthy subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while evaluating the risk of fifty more or less risky conditions presented as written terms. We analyzed brain activations during the individual estimations of ‘high’ against ‘low’ risk. Further, the individual brain activations associated with ‘negative’ versus ‘not negative’ emotional valence of the terms were analyzed.

Results

Estimating hazards to be of high risk was associated with activation in medial thalamus, anterior insula, nucleus caudatus, posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus. These areas were not involved according to the analysis of the emotion ratings.

Conclusions

The results point to a substantial contribution of viscerosensitive areas to signal high risk and supports models of an intuitive “gut” feeling independent of the subjective emotional valence when estimating a high risk of environmental hazards.

Type
Neuroimaging
Information
European Psychiatry , Volume 25 , Issue S1: 18th European Congress of Psychiatry. February 27, March 2, 2010 - Munich, Germany , 2010 , 25-E1544
Copyright
Copyright © European Psychiatric Association 2009
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