Approach-avoidance orientations can predict young children’s decision-making

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Approach-avoidance orientations can predict young children’s decision-making Avi Benozio ID1*, Reshit Cohenian1, Robert Hepach2 1 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel, 2 Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom * Abstract a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Benozio A, Cohenian R, Hepach R (2023) Approach-avoidance orientations can predict young children’s decision-making. PLoS ONE 18(7): e0288799. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0288799 Editor: Jaume Garcia-Segarra, Universitat Jaume I Departament d’Economia, SPAIN Received: February 5, 2023 Accepted: July 4, 2023 Published: July 24, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 Benozio et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data for this study are publicly available from the OSF repository (https://osf.io/m9pby). Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. When facing situations that involve risk and reward, some may focus on the opportunity for reward, whereas others may focus on potential risks. Here, we used an original set of pictorial scenarios to try and predict 3- to 8-year-olds’ reward-seeking and risk-avoiding behavior in three decision-making scenarios (N = 99; Mage = 5.6; 47% girls). We found that children’s reward-risk tendencies did not predict sharing behavior in a dictator-game ‘sharing’ task. However, they predicted children’s monopolizing behavior in a dictator-game ‘taking’ task and their preferences between taking home a ‘risky’ or a ‘safe’ reward in a novel prize-preference task. Overall, using a set of original pictorial scenarios to assess individual differences early on in development now provides initial evidence that bridges individual differences and decision-making domains and exposes behavioral patterns that were thus far hidden. Introduction Any adaptive species must somehow balance between avoiding potential threats (e.g., predators), and obtaining potential benefits (e.g., prey). In humans, this basic psychological tension is broadly reflected in two independent neural substrates representing intrinsic motivations: Behavioral Inhibition Systems (BIS) and Behavioral Approach Systems (BAS). BIS is more sensitive to cues of punishment and loss, thus regulating avoidant behavior, while BAS is more susceptible to signals of reward, thus facilitating appetitive behavior [1–8]. One standard assessment of BIS-BAS orientation in adulthood is with a self-report questionnaire [8], which exposed meaningful correlates with frontal EEG asymmetry. Specifically, avoidance-oriented emotional responses (i.e., negative affect in general) are linked with right frontal regions (i.e., BIS), whereas approach-oriented responses (i.e., positive affect) are linked with left frontal areas (i.e., BAS) [5]. Broadly speaking, individuals with an approach motivational orientation may be more likely to engage in social activities, take risks, and express positive emotions. Complementary, individuals with an avoidant motivational orientation may be more likely to shy away from new social interactions, avert risks, and express negative emotions [5, 9–12]. Notably, an age-downward version of the adult questionnaire was designed for young adolescents (8-12-year-olds) [13], and although did not converge to the full factorial structure of the original questionnaire, it was predictive of personality traits and symptoms of psychopathology. For example, BIS was correlated with higher levels of internalizing PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288799 July 24, 2023 1 / 15 PLOS ONE Approach-avoidance orientations predict children’s decision-making symptoms (e.g., Anxiety and Depression), whereas BAS was correlated with externalizing ones (e.g., Hyperactivity and Aggression). The theoretical and pragmatic interplay between approach, avoidance, and inhibitory capacities provides significant associations between temperament in infancy and the developed adult personality [7, 14, 15], and “motivational imbalance” in early childhood correlates with maladaptive behavior in the social sphere [2, 16]. Several comprehensive models suggest that one’s motivational orientation (i.e., BIS or BAS) should be particularly predictive in unfamiliar or ambiguous contexts which involve opportunities for risk and reward [2, 15]. However, unlike in adults or adolescents, measuring BIS-BAS orientation in early childhood is still an open challenge [2]. This challenge is typically addressed by resorting to other measures or paradigms, such as asking caregivers to report about their children [17–21], observational paradigms [22], ‘gamelike’ tasks [23], or longitudinal studies [14, 24, 25]. Such efforts reveal intriguing insights regarding continuity and change in motivational orientation throughout the lifespan [2, 14, 26], yet each also bears inherent disadvantages. Specifically, caregivers’ reports provide an indirect subjective assessment, observational methods demand particular expertise, and ‘game-like’ tasks focus on specific cognitive capabilities such as inhibitory control, working memory, and attention rather than the broad BIS-BAS theoretical framework, and longitudinal studies are expensive and thus rare. Moreover, regarding the developmental trajectory of risk-taking behavior, a recent metaanalyses [27] showed that in laboratory tasks children and young adolescents (5–10 and 11–13 years old, respectively) are equally high at risk-taking, compared to adolescents and adults (14–19 and 20–65 years old, respectively). Thus, crafting a new tool for assessing BIS-BAS orientation will not only provide insights into a developmental period in which such assessments are lacking but will also address a period in which risky behavior is high. The earliest efforts to assess temperament were carried out by Garcia-Coll et al. [25] and Kagan et al. [28] who introduced two-year-olds to unfamiliar scenarios, such as interactions with strangers, new environments, and unpredictable toys. Based on behavioral and psychophysiological assessments, toddlers were categorized into one of three groups: inhibited, uninhibited, or neither. Subsequent research that followed these innovative studies, further revealed that having a history of behavioral inhibition in childhood predicts an attentional bias toward potential threats in adolescents [29], and when this heightened attentional bias is accompanied by heightened negative self-evaluation, then the likelihood of developing social withdrawal in later adulthood increases [14, 30, 31]. Notably, associations between temperament in childhood and adaptive behavior in adulthood cannot be se (...truncated)