Brain-outcome associations for risk taking depend on the measures used to capture individual differences

Maladaptive risk taking can have severe individual and societal consequences, thus individual differences are prominent targets for intervention and prevention. How to capture individual differences in risk taking, however, presents a major challenge because convergence between measures is mostly low. Considering that functional brain markers are being examined for their potential to account for various risk-taking related outcomes, we urgently need to establish the role of risk-taking measures for establishing reliable brain-outcome associations. To address this issue, we analyzed within-participant neuroimaging data for two widely used risk-taking measures collected from the imaging subsample of the Basel–Berlin Risk Study (N = 116 young human adults), and computed brain-outcome associations within/out-of-measure as well as within/out-of-session. Although we observed a regionally-specific convergence of group-level activation differences for the two imaging measures in the nucleus accumbens, one of the core brain regions associated with risk taking, results from our individual differences analyses suggest that (1) individual differences in brain activation are not preserved between measures, and (2) the success of brain-outcome associations for risk taking is highly dependent on the measures used to capture neural and behavioral individual differences. Our results help to better filter risk- taking measures for their potential to establish brain markers for intervention or prevention purposes.