George Ainslie

Increased functional coupling between the left fronto‐parietal network and anterior insula predicts steeper delay discounting in smokers

In previous work, smokers showed steeper devaluation of delayed rewards than non‐smokers. While the neural correlates of this link between nicotine dependence and delay of discounting are not established, altered activity in executive networks may relate to impaired delayed gratification. The goal of this study was to examine neural correlates of discounting and their relation to nicotine dependence. Thirty‐nine smokers and 33 non‐smokers completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) intertemporal choice task in which they made individualized Hard (similarly valued), easy (dissimilarly valued), and control monetary choices. FMRI data were analyzed using a group independent component analysis and dual regression. Smokers discounted more steeply than non‐smokers, although this difference was only significant among severely dependent smokers. Intertemporal choices recruited distinct left‐ and right‐lateralized fronto‐parietal networks. A group‐by‐difficulty interaction indicated that smokers, relative to non‐smokers, exhibited less difficulty‐sensitivity in the right fronto‐parietal network. In contrast, smokers showed greater functional connectivity between the left fronto‐parietal network and the left fronto‐insular cortex. Moreover, the degree of functional connectivity between the left fronto‐parietal network and left fronto‐insular cortex was significantly correlated with individual differences in discounting. Thus, greater functional coupling between the anterior insula and left fronto‐parietal network is a candidate neural substrate linking smoking and impulsivity. Given the anterior insulas role in interfacing cognitive and interoceptive processing, this altered functional connectivity may relate to an addiction‐related bias towards immediate rewards. Hum Brain Mapp 35:3774–3787, 2014.

Grasping the Impalpable: The Role of Endogenous Reward in Choices, Including Process Addictions

ABSTRACT The list of proposed addictions has recently grown to include television, videogames, shopping, day trading, kleptomania, and use of the Internet. These activities share with a more established entry, gambling, the property that they require no delivery of a biological stimulus that might be thought to unlock a hardwired brain process. I propose a framework for analyzing that class of incentives that do not depend on the prediction of physically privileged environmental events: people have a great capacity to coin endogenous reward; we learn to cultivate it, and, where it is entrapping, to minimize it, by managing internally generated appetites for it. The basic method of cultivating endogenous reward is to learn cues that predict when best to harvest the reward that has been made possible by the growth of these appetites. This hedonic management occurs in the same motivational marketplace as the instrumental planning that seeks environmental goods in the conventional manner, and presumably obeys the same laws of temporal difference learning; but these laws are no longer limiting. Furthermore, instrumental contingencies often provide the most productive structure for hedonic management as well, for reasons that I discuss; but the needs of hedonic management create incentives both to pursue instrumental goals in a suboptimal manner and to avoid noticing how the hedonic incentive affects this pursuit. The result is the apparent irrationality that is often observed in process addictions.

Cold climates demand more intertemporal self-control than warm climates.

A climate that is too cold to grow crops for part of the year demands foresight and self-control skills. To the extent that a culture has developed intertemporal bargaining, its members will have more autonomy, but pay the cost of being more compulsive, than members of societies that have not. Monetary resources will be a consequence but will also be fed back as a cause.

Addressing problem gambling: South Africa's National Responsible Gambling Programme.

In the English-speaking world and some parts of Europe, problem and pathological gambling are treated as a significant public health problem. At the same time, these jurisdictions recognise that for most of those who engage in it, gambling is a harmless leisure activity that may yield public benefits by contributing more in taxation than other leisure industries and/or contributing to out-of-town tourism. Strategies that combine minimising the harm caused with maximising the benefits of gambling are therefore crucial for good public policy. Such lessons may also be relevant to other legal and illegal industries, such as those involving the production and sales of alcohol, where analogous harms and benefits exist.

Picoeconomics in Neural and Evolutionary Contexts

Hyperbolic delay discount curves reflect a basic psychophysical principle and are not maladaptive in nonhumans. However, in people who plan, they create conflicts between present motives and expected future motives. Unlike conflicts between simultaneous motives, these cannot be resolved by simply weighing the alternatives against one another, but instead confront a person with sequential strategic choices. Such choices are the subject of picoeconomics (micro–micro-economics). In recent centuries willpower has become the most approved means of stabilizing intertemporal conflicts, in addition to social commitment. In willpower a variant of repeated prisoner’s dilemma can be inferred from behavioral experiments and common experience—as clarified by thought experiments—but current neuroimaging techniques cannot visualize the self-interpretations that are hypothesized. fMRI does suggest that a unified reward network is modulated by prefrontal cortical activity, which is recruited even by the process of choice itself.

Pleasure and Aversion: Challenging the Conventional Dichotomy

Abstract Philosophy and its descendents in the behavioral sciences have traditionally divided incentives into those that are sought and those that are avoided. Positive incentives are held to be both attractive and memorable because of the direct effects of pleasure. Negative incentives are held to be unattractive but still memorable (the problem of pain) because they force unpleasant emotions on an individual by an unmotivated process, either a hardwired response (unconditioned response) or one substituted by association (conditioned response). Negative incentives are divided into those that are always avoided and those that are avoided only by higher mental processes—archetypically the passions, which are also thought of as hardwired or conditioned. Newer dichotomies within the negative have been proposed, hinging on whether a negative incentive is nevertheless sought (“wanted but not liked”) or on an incentives being negative only because it is confining (the product of “rule worship”). The newer dichotomies have lacked motivational explanations, and there is reason to question conditioning in the motivational mechanism for the older ones. Both experimental findings and the examination of common experience indicate that even the most aversive experiences, such as pain and panic, do not prevail in reflex fashion, but because of an urge to attend to them. The well-established hyperbolic curve in which prospective rewards are discounted implies a mechanism for such an urge, as well as for the “lower” incentives in the other dichotomies. The properties of these lower incentives are predicted by particular durations of temporary preferences on a continuum that stretches from fractions of a second to years.

Psychopathology arises from intertemporal bargaining as well as from emotional trauma.

The role of emotional trauma in psychopathology is limited. One additional mechanism is predictable from hyperbolic discounting: When a person uses willpower to control urges each success or failure takes on extra significance through recursive self-prediction, potentially motivating several constricting defense mechanisms. The need for eliciting emotion in psychotherapy is as the authors say it is, but their hypothesis about reconsolidation of memories adds no explanatory power.

A "cohesive moral community" is already patrolling behavioral science.

Authors of non-liberal proposals experience more collegial objections than others do. These objections are often couched as criticism of determinism, reductionism, or methodological individualism, but from a scientific viewpoint such criticism could be easily answered. Underneath it is a wish to harness scientific belief in service of positive social values, at the cost of reducing objectivity.

Drugs' rapid payoffs distort evaluation of their instrumental uses

Science has needed a dispassionate valuation of psychoactive drugs, but a motivational analysis should be conducted with respect to long-term reward rather than reproductive fitness. Because of hyperbolic overvaluation of short-term rewards, an individuals valuation depends on the time she forms it and the times she will revisit it, sometimes making her best long-term interest lie in total abstinence.

Chapter 2 – Hyperbolic Discounting as a Factor in Addiction: A critical Analysis

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an introduction to hyperbolic discounting. It supplies a promising mechanism for temporary preference. The implications of hyperbolic discounting clearly bear on phenomenon of temporary preference. A subject who discounts expected rewards hyperbolically is apt to choose imminent but inferior alternatives that one would pass up if he/she chose at a distance. Hyperbolic discounting provides a framework for understanding the cycles of resolution, indulgence, and regret that are the sin qua non of addiction. This chapter includes several problems with the hyperbolic discounting hypothesis, and provides suggestions as to how they might be solved within the hyperbolic discounting framework. Hyperbolic discounting motivates self-control; there have been many opinions about how people achieve self-control. The simplest would be that people learn to modify the steepness of their discount curves directly.Publisher Summary This chapter provides an introduction to hyperbolic discounting. It supplies a promising mechanism for temporary preference. The implications of hyperbolic discounting clearly bear on phenomenon of temporary preference. A subject who discounts expected rewards hyperbolically is apt to choose imminent but inferior alternatives that one would pass up if he/she chose at a distance. Hyperbolic discounting provides a framework for understanding the cycles of resolution, indulgence, and regret that are the sin qua non of addiction. This chapter includes several problems with the hyperbolic discounting hypothesis, and provides suggestions as to how they might be solved within the hyperbolic discounting framework. Hyperbolic discounting motivates self-control; there have been many opinions about how people achieve self-control. The simplest would be that people learn to modify the steepness of their discount curves directly.