Abstract
Lower financial savings among individuals experiencing adverse social determinants of health (SDoH) increases vulnerabilities during times of crisis.
SDoH including low socioeconomic status (low-SES) influence cognitive abilities as well as health and life outcomes that may perpetuate poverty and disparities.
Despite evidence suggesting a role for financial growth in minimizing SDoH-related disparities and vulnerabilities, neurobiological mechanisms linked with financial behavior remain to be elucidated.
As such, we examined the relationships between brain activity during decision-making (DM), laboratory-based task performance, and money savings behavior.
Participants (N = 24, 14 females) from low-SES households (income<$20,000/year) underwent fMRI scanning while performing the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), a DM paradigm probing risky- and strategic-DM processes.
Participants also completed self-report instruments characterizing relevant personality characteristics and then engaged in a community outreach financial program where amount of money saved was tracked over a 6-month period.
Regarding BART-related brain activity, we observed expected activity in regions implicated in reward and emotional processing including the amygdala.
Regarding brain-behavior relationships, we found that laboratory-based BART performance mediated the impact of amygdala activity on real-world behavior.
That is, elevated amygdala activity was linked with BART strategic-DM which, in turn, was linked with more money saved after 6 months.
In exploratory analyses, this mediation was moderated by emotion-related personality characteristics such that, only individuals reporting lower alexithymia demonstrated a relationship between amygdala activity and savings.
These outcomes suggest that DM-related amygdala activity and/or emotion-related personality characteristics may provide utility as an endophenotypic marker of individual’s financial savings behavior.