Award Date

5-1-2019

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

First Committee Member

Stephen Benning

Second Committee Member

Andrew Freeman

Third Committee Member

Kimberly Barchard

Fourth Committee Member

Peter Gray

Number of Pages

67

Abstract

Risk taking is a complex heterogeneous construct that has proven difficult to assess, especially when using behavioral tasks. A new measure, the Assessment of Physical Risk Taking (APRT) is presented as a comprehensive assessment of several factors of risk. Specifically, the measure seeks to examine the effects of several decision-making elements (e.g., probability of success and failure, magnitude of reward and punishment) of different types of physically risky behaviors and produce a variety of different outcome scores. Participants (N = 256) completed APRT in a laboratory setting, with half being assigned to an enforced Delay condition. Main effects, two-way interactions among five within-subject factors, and interactions between the within-subject factors and Delay were estimated for four APRT outcome scores using Generalized Estimating Equations. Results indicated that Injury Magnitude and Injury Probability exerted much stronger effects than any of the other independent variables. The implications of these results are discussed in the context of the future of behavioral risk-taking tasks and studies.

Keywords

Behavioral risk; Experimental task; Probability; Punishment; Reward

Disciplines

Psychology

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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