You need this because your doctor incompetently doesn't have 100% recovery protocols!
My resilience story: I would still be leading a life of quiet desperation if still married.
(Life is definitely better as I age, I got divorced enhancing my happiness immeasurably. I'm retired and comfortably well off. And healthy as I can be post stroke. I'm going to live a long time yet.)
How the Brain Dampens Losses to Support Mental Toughness
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.(In our case major 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
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