Emotions and individual differences shape human foraging under threat.

ABSTRACT: A common behavior in natural environments is foraging for rewards. However, this is often in the presence of predators. Therefore, one of the most fundamental decisions for humans, as for other animals, is how to apportion time between reward-motivated pursuit behavior and threat-motivated checking behavior. To understand what affects how people strike this balance, we developed an ecologically inspired task and looked at both within-participant dynamics (moods) and between-participant individual differences (questionnaires about real-life behaviors) in two large internet samples (n = 374 and n = 702) in a cross-sectional design. For the within-participant dynamics, we found that people regulate task-evoked stress homeostatically by changing behavior (increasing foraging and

SUBMITTER: Trier HA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11978516 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature