All emotions such as sadness, anger, fear or joy undoubtedly have an important place in our
lives. Our emotions influence all areas of our lives and particularly our relationships: with
our spouses, our friends, our children, our colleagues. Emotions are necessary for our
decisions. By influencing our decisions, emotions automatically impact our performance.
By guiding our choices, our emotions lead us to take risks. Taking risks is sometimes
essential to a suitable decision. But this risk-taking must not result from an inappropriate
decision-making process. People must therefore adapt their risk-taking, i.e. integrate our
emotions into decision-making. It is therefore not a question of ignoring one's emotions, but
of regulating them in order to be in a state favorable to action. This awareness of emotional
feelings would help develop the ability to produce good internal feedback.
The purpose of COSMOS project is to help individuals better self-assess by taking advantage
of their emotional feelings. To do this, investigators will teach individuals to detect and
manage their emotions using an emotional neurofeedback device developped by the Neuraxess
platform (a functional neuroimiaging and neurostimulation platform, located in Besancon,
France). Neurofeedback is a type of biofeedback, namely a rehabilitation method based on the
subject's awareness of physiological processes, during which the neuronal activity of an
individual is measured and presented to him in real time, here in artistic form. The goal of
this method is that the individual manages to self-regulate his neuronal activity supposed to
underlie a specific behavior. So, over time, the participant might be able to learn how to
voluntarily control the activation of their cerebral cortex in order to regulate their
emotions and behaviors in everyday life. Here, by learning to detect and manage their
emotions, participants will be able to take more appropriate risks. The balloon test (Balloon
Analogue Risk Task or BART) is used to measure risk taking. This tasks consists of inflating
a balloon by clicking on a button on the computer. The more the balloon inflates, the more
money participants earn, but the involved risk is to reach a threshold where the balloon
bursts and participants lose everything. Participants have the choice between reaching the
limit and losing everything or controlling ourselves and recovering our gains before the
disaster. This is a simple test but it closely matches the behavior of the player at a poker
or roulette table in a casino. Participants' risk-taking will be assessed before the
emotional neurofeedback sessions and then after 10 sessions.