ArticleScientific reports2023
Risk taking for potential losses but not gains increases with time of day.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Nocturnal Risk Assessment and Its Association With Anxiety Symptoms.Psychophysiology · 2026Trial
- Towards naturalistic social neuroscience: A multi-level framework integrating real-world phenotyping, neurobiology, and computational mechanisms.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- How Outcome Framing and Feedback Influence Decision Patterns over Time.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Cognitive modeling of real-world behavior for understanding mental health.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Digital questionnaire response time (DQRT): A ubiquitous and low-cost digital assay of cognitive processing speed.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- A common alteration in effort-based decision-making in apathy, anhedonia, and late circadian rhythm.eLife · 2025Article
- Temporal stability of Bayesian belief updating in perceptual decision-making.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Measuring self-regulation in everyday life: Reliability and validity of smartphone-based experiments in alcohol use disorder.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Relating psychiatric symptoms and self-regulation during the COVID-19 crisis.Translational psychiatry · 2022Article
- Smartphones and the Neuroscience of Mental Health.Annual review of neuroscience · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Humans exhibit distinct risk preferences when facing choices involving potential gains and losses. These preferences are believed to be subject to neuromodulatory influence, particularly from dopamine and serotonin. As neuromodulators manifest circadian rhythms, this suggests decision making under risk might be affected by time of day. Here, in a large subject sample collected using a smartphone application, we found that risky options with potential losses were increasingly chosen over the course of the day. We observed this result in both a within-subjects design (N = 2599) comparing risky options chosen earlier and later in the day in the same individuals, and in a between-subjects design (N = 26,720) showing our effect generalizes across ages and genders. Using computational modelling, we show this diurnal change in risk preference reflects a decrease in sensitivity to increasing losses, but no change was observed in the relative impacts of gains and losses on choice (i.e., loss aversion). Thus, our findings reveal a striking diurnal modulation in human decision making, a pattern with potential importance for real-life decisions that include voting, medical decisions, and financial investments.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.