BRIEF REPORT Feeling Good and Taking a Chance? Associations of Hypomania Risk with Cognitive and Behavioral Risk Taking Hillary C. Devlin 1 • Sheri L. Johnson 2 • June Gruber 3 Published online: 4 April 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract Although elevated impulsivity among indi- viduals at risk for or with a clinical history of mania has been identified in prior work, questions remain regarding ways in which impulsivity may manifest as risky decision- making and behavior. The present investigation examined how hypomania risk, measured using the Hypomanic Per- sonality Scale, was associated with two facets of risk-tak- ing: cognitive appraisals of risks and benefits that will result from risk-taking, and behavioral risk-taking on a validated task and self-report measures. Hypomania risk was associated with appraising future risk-taking as having less costs, but was unrelated to appraising future risk-tak- ing as having more benefits. On behavioral risk measures, it was associated with increased expectations of engage- ment in risky behavior over the next 6 months, yet also with markers of lower risk-taking on the BART. The pre- sent findings have implications for understanding precise cognitive and behavioral factors that underlie the rela- tionship between hypomania risk and risk-taking. Keywords Hypomania risk Á Positive emotion Á Impulsivity Á Risk-taking Introduction Within the field of emotion and psychopathology, much of the existing work has directed attention toward negative emotion disturbance. However, emerging work has re- vealed the importance of examining how positive emotion relates to maladaptive physical and mental health outcomes (e.g., Gruber 2011; Gruber et al. 2008, 2011), particularly when positive emotion is experienced at an intensity or duration that does not fit the context in which it occurs (Gruber 2011). Positive emotion states increase the likeli- hood that some individuals will engage in risky behavior (e.g., substance use and binge-eating; Cyders and Smith 2008). Therefore, it is important to advance our under- standing of how positive emotion leads to risky behavior, particularly among individuals for whom this risky be- havior often becomes most problematic (e.g., individuals at risk for or with a clinical diagnosis). Mania is defined by cardinal symptoms of a distinct period of persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood (American Psychiatric Association 2000). Patients with a clinical history of mania (i.e., diagnosis of bipolar disorder) often exhibit higher impulsivity according to self-report measures, both during manic (e.g., Strakowski et al. 2010; Swann et al. 2003) and euthymic (e.g., Reddy et al. 2014; Swann et al. 2001, 2003) phases of the disorder. In addition, prior research found that medicated manic patients, as compared to healthy controls, exhibited poorer performance on a computerized betting task (i.e., choosing ‘‘less likely’’ outcomes on a greater percentage of the trials), which indi- cates a greater tendency toward risk-taking (Murphy et al. 2001). However, it is often difficult to identify heightened impulsivity on behavioral tasks among individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) when assessed outside of a manic episode (e.g., Edge et al. 2013; Strakowski et al. 2010). & June Gruber june.gruber@colorado.edu 1 Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA 2 Department of Psychology, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA 3 Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, 345 UCB Muenzinger D321C, Boulder, CO 80309-0345, USA 123 Cogn Ther Res (2015) 39:473–479 DOI 10.1007/s10608-015-9679-3