Yin Wu, a final year phd student working with Luke Clark in Cambridge, has had two papers published this month back to back in the journal Psychophysiology. The first study is looking at facial muscle responses to near-misses. The classic gambling near-miss is strictly a ‘near win’, but using a wheel of fortune task, Yin’s paper is one of the first to consider the logical counterpart to the near win, the ‘near loss’ (where the player narrowly avoids a major penalty). The second paper using a behavioural economic task to elicit ‘counterfactual thinking’ – how the emotional response to an outcome is changed by what might have happened. The corrugator muscle (in the brow), which is highly sensitive to unpleasant pictures, also responds to gambling losses and is heightened in the key regret condition. Congrats Yin!
Wu Y, van Dijk E, Clark L. Near-wins and near-losses in gambling: a behavioral and facial EMG study. Psychophysiology 2014, doi: 10.1111/psyp.12336.
Wu Y, Clark L. Disappointment and regret enhance corrugator reactivity in a gambling task. Psychophysiology 2014, doi: 10.1111/psyp.12371.