Factors Affecting Cognitive Decision Making

This analysis persists of key points, about The article “Stress and the brain by Janet Elder”. The author forged an excellent informative piece to educate the reader on the effects of stress on the brain. The author states that “Stress can be both good and bad. It is part of life, and your brain and body respond to it”. The author clarifies that, "Whether stress is harmful or helpful depends on the amount of stress, how severe it is, and how long it lasts".

The decision making process includes cognitive processes that eventually lead to a choice in action while taking into consideration the alternative possibilities (Allen, Dorozenko, & Roberts, 2016). Not all choices have to lead to an action. The values and preferences of the person making the choice also comes into play when making the final decision. Problem-solving to obtain a certain goal or satisfactory by a solution is the main reason people go through the decision making process (Stefaniak, & Tracey, 2014). This process has many factors that end with one final result or solution. The decisions made can be rational or irrational and can be determined by explicit or tacit knowledge (Qingyao, Dongyu, & Weihua, 2016). Since the decision making process can be very difficult at time, psychologists have viewed the process in different perspectives to get a better understanding (Rossi, Picchi, Di Stefano, Marongiu, & Scarsini, 2015). The different perspectives include; psychological, cognitive, and normative or communicative rationality.

For the most part, our decision-making processes are either sub-conscious or made fairly quickly due to the nature of the decision before us. Most of us don't spend much time deciding what to have for lunch, what to wear, or what to watch on television. For other, more complex decisions, we need to spend more time and analyze the elements of the decision and potential consequences. To assist with this, many people employ the use of a decision-making model. Utilizing a

Every action a person takes is the result of having thought about what it is they think they should do and then doing it. Life is riddled with problems that require solving. Decisions are complex matters that require careful judgment and problem analysis especially when one is in a role where others look up to them and are affected by their decisions.

There are many of factors influencing your decision making process either in a positive or a negative way. In addition to what is already determined by your genes, according to various sources the following biological and psychological factors play an important role.

Decision making is where one must make a choice (most of the time trivial), like “Should I have ice-cream or cake?” or “Should I do my homework or not?”. All of these things have one thing in common though, they all have positive and negative effects on the person in question like becoming fat, or getting a bad grade. It is extremely excruciating to me to make decisions because of this reason. So to combat this I will attempt to put myself into undesired

Our understanding of why flawed decisions are so common comes from work done by neuroscientists and decision scientists to understand how the brain works when faced with a set of circumstances that require a decision (Finkelstein, S., Whitehead, J., & Campbell, A. (2009).

Rational decision making seems pretty straightforward, but in this article Dr. David Fassler, a psychiatry professor at the University of Vermont College of Medicine clarifies that,

The purpose of this experiment is to evaluate the effects of stress on college students and their cognitive processing. If stress negatively affects cognitive thinking, then at least 80% of the students will score lower on quiz #2.

In today’s economy, decision-making skills vary for each household; however, the bottom-line goal for every individual is to get the most for their money. In order to do this, there are 4 principles of individual decision-making: facing trade-offs, evaluating what one is giving up to obtain their goal, thinking at the margin, and responding to incentives.

When the body is in an unstable state or feels threatened, the body will set itself in a “fight or-flight-or-freeze” mode, also known as the stress response (Smith, R. Segal, and J. Segal). Another definition of stress, according to Firdaus Dhabhar, is that stress is “a constellation of events that begins with a stimulus or challenge that is detected by the brain that then activates the flight-or-flight systems in the body (biological stress response)” (Richter). Psychologist Connie Lillas presents a driving analogy in order to show the three most general ways people respond to stress. The first way is known as “foot on the gas.” This is the “fight” response, and a person is usually uptight and angry.

Based on information from the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), the National Gambling Impact Study Commission (NGISC) states that there are two and a half million individuals who fall into a state defined as a pathological gambler, another three million are considered problem gamblers, and roughly fifteen million more could be considered “at-risk” (NORC, 1999). A pathological gambler is one who has a severe uncontrollable urge to gamble despite harmful negative consequences or a desire to stop. This project proposes to address the need to keep a casino patron from developing a pathological or compulsive gambling problem. The project will entail investigating the driving factors for a person gambling themselves into problems and

Cocaine addicts exhibited decreased decision making performance on the Iowa Gambling Task compared to healthy controls. Previous findings have demonstrated similar results (Bechara & Martin, 2004; Grant, Contoreggi, & London, 2000; Yan et al., 2014). For example, Grant, Contoreggi, and London (2000) also found that addicted individuals performed worse on the Iowa Gambling Task compared to healthy controls. In the study done by Grant, Contoreggi, and London (2000), a majority of the drug addicts preferred to select cards from the decks that resulted in higher initial gains but also resulted in higher total losses. They explained that the relationship between addiction and decreased performance on the Iowa Gambling Task was due to increased impulsivity in drug addicts (Grant, Contoreggi, & London, 2000). Our current findings support these

Decision-making can be a cognitive process of selecting a course of action form various options. Some of us are logical. Some of us are risk taking. Either way such characteristics play a role in our decisions. In my experience decision-making can

As educated people, we often try to ignore the influence of emotions on decision-making. Neuroscience evidence now shows that sound and rational decision making is contingent on prior accurate emotional processing. The basis for this is the somatic marker hypothesis. The somatic marker hypothesis provides a systems level neuroanatomical and cognitive framework for decision-making, the impact, and influence on it by emotions. The key idea of this hypothesis is that decision-making is a process that is influenced by marker signals that arise in bio regulatory processes, which includes those that express themselves in emotions and feelings. This influence can occur at multiple levels of operation, some of which occur consciously and some of which occur non-consciously (Bechara & Damasio, 2000).