Summary: Psychological resilience may be rooted in how the brain mathematically weighs “costs” versus “benefits.” A study published suggests that resilient individuals do not necessarily value rewards more; instead, they place less value on minor losses.
This “acceptance bias” in decision-making is mediated by specific prefrontal brain activity, which may allow resilient people to better regulate their emotional responses to negative information.
Key Research Findings
- The Valuation Bias: In experiments involving financial gains and losses, some participants consistently placed less weight on negative consequences. This led them to accept more “mixed” offers than their peers.
- Not About the Reward: Resilient individuals did not show an increased craving or value for rewards; their unique trait was specifically how they processed negative information.
- Neural Mediators: Participants who discounted minor losses showed stronger increases in prefrontal cortex activity when facing those losses. Conversely, they showed more reduced activity when receiving gains.
- Link to Resilience: These distinct brain response patterns directly correlated with higher self-reported psychological resilience.
- Cognitive Control: Researchers believe that the heightened prefrontal response to negative data enables individuals to better control their thoughts and feelings regarding losses.
Source: SfN
Whether people are mulling over the pros and cons of a purchase or assessing their interactions with new people, they may show a bias in placing more value on perceived positive or negative information.
In a new Journal of Neuroscience paper, Ulrike Basten and colleagues, from RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau and the University of Amsterdam, explored whether individual differences in processing benefits and costs are linked to psychological resilience.
The researchers presented 82 participants with images of different colored shapes. Colors and shapes were associated with gains or losses that culminated in real earned money or costs at the end of the experiment. Given the same presentation of different colored shapes, some participants generally put less value on minor losses, which led them to accept more of the offers.
Emphasizing this point further, says Basten, “These individuals don’t put more value on rewards, they put less value on negative consequences and have a higher tendency to accept offers with mixed consequences. How they process negative information is different.”
Why might this be the case? The researchers found that participants who put less value on minor losses had stronger increases in prefrontal brain activity to the losses and more reduced activity when they received gains.
These brain response differences mediated the link between the acceptance bias in decision-making and higher self-reported psychological resilience.
According to the researchers, their work suggests that stronger prefrontal brain responses to negative information may enable people to control their thoughts and feelings about losses. This control may be what makes these people more psychologically resilient.
Says Basten, “We can’t claim causality from our findings, so one next step could be to manipulate the bias by rewarding certain answers—essentially training people to show more positive bias in decision-making—and see if that leads to better resilience.”
Key Questions Answered:
A: Not quite. Optimism usually implies expecting a better outcome. This research suggests resilience is actually about valuation—the ability to look at a potential negative and decide it isn’t a “big deal”. It’s a dampening of the negative rather than an inflation of the positive.
A: The researchers are looking into exactly that. One potential next step is “bias training,” where rewarding certain decisions could help individuals develop a more positive bias, potentially leading to improved resilience.
A: The prefrontal cortex is the brain’s “executive office.” Stronger activity here when facing a loss suggests the brain is working harder to regulate and control the emotional impact of that loss, keeping it from overwhelming the person’s decision-making process.
Editorial Notes:
- This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
- Journal paper reviewed in full.
- Additional context added by our staff.
About this neuroscience research news
Author: SfN Media
Source: SfN
Contact: SfN Media – SfN
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
“Positive Bias in Value-Based Decision-Making: Neurocognitive Associations with Resilience” by Rebecca A. Rammensee, Andrew Heathcote and Ulrike Basten. Journal of Neuroscience
DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1734-25.2026
Abstract
Positive Bias in Value-Based Decision-Making: Neurocognitive Associations with Resilience
Biased information processing plays an important role in mental disorders. This study investigates choice biases in value-based decision making and how links to psychological resilience are related to individual differences in cognitive and neural processing of reward and punishment signals.
In a cost-benefit integration task, 82 participants (41 female, 41 male human subjects) weighed gains and losses associated with different features (color, shape) of compound visual stimuli.
A positive choice bias in decision making was associated with trait acceptance as a facet of self-reported resilience – and this cross-sectional link was statistically mediated by differences in the neural processing of value information as measured with fMRI: Participants with a more positive choice bias and higher trait acceptance showed stronger increases in neural activity in response to negative information (loss) in ten prefrontal and parietal brain regions – and stronger decreases in response to positive information (gain) in the right inferior frontal junction.
Cognitive-computational modeling revealed that more positive choice biases were associated with lower sensitivity to and valuation of negative relative to positive information. Notably, higher valuation of positive information was associated with stronger neural responses to negative information in dACC and insula.
Finally, choice bias and trait acceptance were associated with functional connectivity between prefrontal seeds, midbrain, striatum, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
The stronger activation of brain regions associated with cognitive control, specifically for negative information, suggests a stronger regulatory influence on the processing of negative information, potentially promoting a positive choice bias that is able to support resilience.
