Mirko Pawlikowski

University of Duisburg-Essen | uni-due

Executive functioning is supposed to have an important role in decision making under risk. Several studies reported that more advantageous decision-making behavior was accompanied by better performance in tests of executive functioning and that the decision-making process was accompanied by activations in prefrontal and subcortical brain regions as...

Recent research indicates that angry facial expressions are preferentially processed and may facilitate automatic avoidance response, especially in socially anxious individuals. However, few studies have examined whether this bias also expresses itself in more complex cognitive processes and behavior such as decision making. We recently introduced...

Theoretical approaches on goal setting imply that explicit goals may improve decision-making performance by guiding development and application of goal-oriented decision-making strategies and increasing cognitive and behavioural effort. In contrast, relatively high goals may increase risk-taking by inducing risky decision-making strategies. We test...

Individuals with anxiety disorders typically avoid fear-relevant stimuli even if they miss potential rewards. However, few studies have accounted for such costs of fear-related avoidance in doing so. In this study, 51 spider fearful and 49 non-fearful participants completed the Spider Gambling Task, our modification of the Iowa Gambling Task, to in...

Stress and additional load on the executive system, produced by a parallel working memory task, impair decision making under risk. However, the combination of stress and a parallel task seems to preserve the decision-making performance [e.g., operationalized by the Game of Dice Task (GDT)] from decreasing, probably by a switch from serial to parall...

Previous studies demonstrated that executive functions are crucial for advantageous decision making under risk and that therefore decision making is disrupted when working memory capacity is demanded while working on a decision task. While some studies also showed that emotions can affect decision making under risk, it is unclear how affective proc...

Many people watch sexually arousing material on the Internet in order to receive sexual arousal and gratification. When browsing for sexual stimuli, individuals have to make several decisions, all possibly leading to positive or negative consequences. Decision-making research has shown that decisions under ambiguity are influenced by consequences r...

Background and aims: Cybersex addiction is discussed controversially, while empirical evidence is widely missing. With respect to its mechanisms of development and maintenance Brand et al. (2011) assume that reinforcement due to cybersex should lead to the development of cue-reactivity and craving explaining recurrent cybersex use in the face of gr...

A key element of research on Internet addiction is a valid and reliable assessment of problems individuals experience in their daily life due to an excessive or pathological use of the Internet. One of the most frequently used questionnaires is Young’s Internet Addiction Test (IAT). However, the factorial structure of the IAT is still discussed con...

In everyday life, decisions are often made under stress and while being occupied with multiple tasks. It has recently been shown that acute stress impairs decision making under risk. Performing a parallel executive task also caused riskier decision making. To investigate the effects of a combination of these two factors on decision making, we condu...

Theoretical assumptions suggest that explicit and factual advice can enhance performance during decision-making. However, theory indicates that the degree of positive influence may be moderated by specific cognitive abilities associated with prefrontal cortex circuits, which are involved in decision making. We hypothesized that executive and workin...

It is still a topic of debate whether pathological Internet use (PIU) is a distinct entity or whether it should be differentiated between pathological use of specific Internet activities like playing Internet games and spending time on Internet sex sites. The aim of the current study was to contribute to a better understanding of common and differe...

Models of decision making postulate that interactions between contextual conditions and characteristics of the decision maker determine decision-making performance. We tested this assumption by using a possible positive contextual influence (goals) and a possible negative contextual influence (anchor) in a risky decision-making task (Game of Dice T...

In many situations of everyday life decisions have to be made simultaneously to other activities and under the influence of stress. Neuropsychological studies demonstrated that stress leads to more disadvantageous decision making. The current fMRI-experiment investigated neural correlates underlying the effect of stress (induced by the Trier Social...

Der Alltag besteht oft aus Situationen, in denen unter Stress mehrere Aufgaben gleichzeitig bewältigt werden müssen. Verschiedene Studien konnten bisher zeigen, dass Stress zu Deaktivierungen im Bereich des dorsolateralen präfrontalen Cortex führt (z.B. Oei et al., 2007), dem Bereich, der auch mit Entscheidungsverhalten in Risikosituationen assozii...

The dysfunctional behavior of excessive Internet gamers, such as preferring the immediate reward (to play World of Warcraft) despite the negative long-term consequences may be comparable with the dysfunctional behavior in substance abusers or individuals with behavioral addictions, e.g. pathological gambling. In these disorders, general decision-ma...

Recent research suggests two ways of making decisions: an intuitive and an analytical one. The current study examines whether a secondary executive task interferes with advantageous decision-making in the Game of Dice Task (GDT), a decision-making task with explicit and stable rules that taps executive functioning. One group of participants perform...

Bisherige Studien weisen auf Unterschiede zwischen den Geschlechtern in Bezug auf Nutzung und Bewertung pornographischer Bilder hin (Carroll et al., 2008). Gegenstand der vorliegenden Studie ist die Prüfung, ob sich solche Unterschiede auch in Abhängigkeit des Geschlechtsrollenselbstkonzepts finden. Dazu wurden 48 heterosexuelle Versuchspersonen (2...

Bisherige Studien haben gezeigt, dass sexuelle Präferenzen implizit durch Viewing Time (VT) Tasks gemessen werden können (Imhoff et al., 2010). Unklar ist jedoch, ob Betrachtungszeiten sexueller Stimuli auch die Vorliebe für spezifische, nicht-deviante Sexualpraktiken abbilden können. Dazu sollten bislang 70 Personen (30 Männer) sexuelle Stimuli (z...

Internetpornographische Seiten stellen Nutzern eine Fülle von expliziten Inhalten zur Verfügung, die teilweise exzessiv genutzt werden. Gegenstand der vorliegenden Arbeit ist der Zusammenhang zwischen der subjektiven Erregung während der Betrachtung pornographischen Materials und der Selbstauskunft bezüglich des internetpornographischen Nutzungsver...

Excessive or addictive Internet use can be linked to different online activities, such as Internet gaming or cybersex. The usage of Internet pornography sites is one important facet of online sexual activity. The aim of the present work was to examine potential predictors of a tendency toward cybersex addiction in terms of subjective complaints in...

To investigate whether patients with alcohol-related Korsakoff syndrome (KR) have emotion-specific or general deficits in multicategoric classification performance. Earlier studies have shown reduced performance in classifying stimuli according to their emotional valence in patients with KS. However, it is unclear whether such classification defici...

We investigated the effects of intelligence, decision-making strategies, and general cognitive styles on the role of feedback in making decisions under risk. A total of 100 healthy volunteers were assessed with the Game of Dice Task (GDT). A total of 50 participants performed the original GDT, and 50 participants performed a modified GDT in which n...

We investigated the role of feedback processing in decision making under risk conditions in 50 patients with amnesia in the course of alcoholic Korsakoff’s syndrome (KS). Half of the patients were administered the Game of Dice Task (GDT) and the remaining 25 patients were examined with a modified version of the GDT in which no feedback was provided...