Assessment of risk-taking and impulsive behaviors: A comparison between three tasks

The balloon analogue risk task (BART), the delay discounting task (DDT), and the Iowa gambling task (IGT) are increasingly used for the assessment of risk-taking and impulsive behaviors. This study examined the reliability of and relationships between these three tasks in healthy Chinese subjects. The BART and DDT showed moderate to high test-retest reliability across three test sessions. However, the IGT showed low reliability for the first two sessions but high reliability for the last two sessions. Between tasks, only the BART and IGT showed significant correlations at the last two sessions, while no other correlations were found. These findings support the view that impulsivity is a complex construct with no single personality trait underlying the disposition for impulsive behaviors.