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 Using brain scans, researchers found different brain areas activated
in response to a setback if the failure was perceived as something
under the person’s control versus a random or uncontrollable cause,
and blaming oneself led to greater persistence.
Studies dating to the 1970s have found that believing a failure was
under your control and not due to an external force encourages
persistence (for example, when failing a test was due to not
studying enough rather than to unfair test design).
Seeing the same thing in the current study “was more of a
confirmation of existing findings,” said the new report’s senior
author Mauricio R. Delgado of the psychology department at Rutgers
University in Newark, New Jersey.
But finding that different areas of the brain respond to a setback
depending on where blame seems to lie is new, he said.
That result suggests that a sense of control or lack of it leads to
calculations about whether to try again through two different types
of thought processes, the researchers conclude.
“Sometimes you feel like it’s beyond your control, but that doesn’t
mean that you don’t persist in those goals,” Delgado told Reuters
Health by phone. “We persist by two different mechanisms.”
For the new study, 30 people from the Rutgers community played an
“academic degree decision game” while undergoing functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, which detect blood flow changes in
the brain.
Players chose a course of study and encountered setbacks during the
game, like failed exams and course cancellations. Each round was a
chance to earn points, and total points affected how much each
player would be paid for volunteering for the study.
The researchers manipulated the game so that losses, or setbacks,
seemed either under the player’s control or out of his control. For
exams, the player could determine the correct move by trial and
error, but the computer determined course cancellations at random.
After each setback, the player chose whether to persist with their
original goal or choose a different goal for the game.
Players tended to persist with their original goal more often after
setbacks they could control, according to the results published in
Neuron.
After a controllable setback, a “primitive” area of the brain called
the ventral striatum lit up on the fMRI. That region is associated
with assigning value to an experience, suggesting the brain was
processing the negative outcome as part of a calculation about
whether to persist, the study team writes.
After uncontrollable setbacks, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC),
which is associated with emotional regulation, lit up.
“For controllable setbacks, activity in the ventral striatum might
help signal that a change in strategy or behavior is needed,” said
Allison Troy, an assistant professor of psychology at Franklin and
Marshall University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
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“For uncontrollable setbacks, the VMPFC may help us to assess the
situation and our emotions about the situation to make a decision
about whether to persist or not,” Troy, who was not involved in the
study, told Reuters Health by email.
“You’d have to take it to the clinic and test this out, but it might
be that you could develop therapy that includes these different
areas of the brain,” Delgado said.
“Perceiving control and thinking you are in control is a very good
thing,” he said. “Having confidence is good even if you perceive you
do not have control, not all hope is lost.”
In certain situations persistence is a good choice, like being on a
diet and failing to reach a weight loss goal, Delgado said. It may
be possible to use therapy to train people who tend to give up in
the face of setbacks to feel more control over the outcome, which
could promote persistence, but that question wasn’t addressed in his
study.
The new research incorporates a long history of studies from social
psychology and health psychology showing that we process outcomes
very differently if we have control over the situation, said Luke
Clark, director of the Center for Gambling Research at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
“For example, the physical impacts of stress like stomach ulcers are
much more severe if the stress is uncontrollable, even when the
amount of objective stress is kept the same,” Clark, who was not
part of the new study, told Reuters Health by email.
In this scenario, persistence was always the best choice, but that’s
not the case in real life, Delgado noted.
“Control also plays a central role in gambling behavior: gamblers
experience an ‘illusion of control’ that they are developing some
skill or expertise over a game that is basically chance,” Clark
said.
If the brain activity changes seen in these experiments underlie the
tendency of gamblers to chase losses due to a misplaced sense of
control, that could have provocative implications for gambling
addiction research, he said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1uG6Vw3 Neuron, online September 4, 2014.
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