This week, Tom and Guy talk about reward and punishment. Reward and punishment are a big part of our lives and why we decide to do the things that we do. Some people are rewarded by starting businesses, and others by playing Club Penguin. We talk about classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and finally reward and punishment sensitivity and how this relates to the decisions people make.

If you want to test your reward sensitivity, here is a link to a scale that has been validated in empirical studies (lab tests).

https://psytests.org/trait/bisbasen.html

The BAS reward responsiveness figure will tell you your reward sensitivity, and the BIS figure will tell you your punishment sensitivity.

Here are some papers we talk about in the episode:

Palatable food has the same response as addictive drugs:

Montalban, E., Giralt, A., Taing, L., Nakamura, Y., Pelosi, A., Brown, M., ... & Girault, J. A. (2023). Operant training for highly palatable food alters translating mRNA in nucleus accumbens D2 neurons and reveals a modulatory role of Neurochondrin. bioRxiv, 2023-03.

Mindfulness effects on habitual responses:

Chen, X., & Reed, P. (2023). The effect of brief mindfulness training on the micro-structure of human free-operant responding: Mindfulness affects stimulus-driven responding. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 79, 101821.

If you want to get in contact with us, reach out on our twitter: https://twitter.com/p05pod

Thanks for listening!