Depression and Obesity Are Factors in Poor Decision-Making Skills

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a tool used to recognize the functioning process of decision-making by assessing the level of proficiency in this type of higher-order thinking. High scores are related to good decision skills based on Beck et al. (2017). This is done by recreating real-life situations in a computer, in which the individual is tested in its ability to control immediate reward systems to more beneficial, long term rewards. According to Beck et al. (2017), emotions are the driving force of decision-making performance.

Therefore, individuals that have had traumatic brain injuries (TBI) or any other biologically related-brain dysregulation in areas of emotion control (such as the amygdala) may perform differently in tasks that involve making the beneficial decision to their person.

In a research where the relationship between adiposity levels, anhedonia (not able to feel pleasure from activities the individual used to like) and the Iowa Gambling Test scores are evaluated they hypothesized that individuals with obesity and a presence of anhedonia are more likely to be lower-functioning in the decision-making cognitive process.

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Previous findings have shown that depression and obesity are factors for the poor decision skills. However, in the case of individuals with obesity, regardless of the presence of anhedonia, they are still prone to binge or emotional eating. The result of this study display that individuals that have anhedonia and with higher levels of adiposity in their ventral lateral area have been shown to be lower-functioning in cognitive process such as decision making as shown by low scores in the Iowa gambling test

A different type of research that relates to how damage to the human prefrontal cortex affects decision-making focuses on understanding the mechanisms responsible for impacting higher-order thinking in individuals with ventromedial prefrontal cortex impairment through the usage of the Iowa Gambling Task .

Major findings show that prefrontal patients act upon their instincts with no interest in remediating their actions to avoid future percussions. To elaborate, individuals with this type of deficit are shown to have a lower threshold for reward arousal and a high threshold for feeling regret after punishment.

In both instances, the researchers of both studies used the same procedures for the IGT. They both used 100 cards in which cards A and B provided a higher reward ($100) but also took the most money away. Cards C and D only gave $50 and subtracted fewer money compared to A and B. Although the research involving anhedonia, obesity and the IGT used three more tests in addition to the IGT, both studies aimed to evaluate the level of proficiency at decision-making skills based on the conditions of their participants.

The research weighing the effects of obesity on poor decisions used the Physical Anhedonia Scale to measure reward systems (higher scores= higher levels of anhedonia), a self-report inventory of depressive symptoms (scores higher than 39= depression) and a questionnaire regarding eating behavior (high scores= eating behavior issues). The number of participants was double (N=116) the amount than the other study in which all of them were obese and with no other health issue besides depression.

Overall, both studies aimed to understand to a better extent the mechanisms behind decision-making and what could cause its impairments. Nonetheless, each study had its limitations. The anhedonia, adiposity study had a great number which could of have reduced its reliability due to possible testing effects thus causing fatigue. In the case of the prefrontal cortex study, the number of participants was very limited which could of have lowered the statistical power necessary to reject or accept the alternative hypothesis. The number of control participants versus the individuals with the actual condition was not a very a assertive comparison due to a possible lack of powerful information that could add up to the final results.