LAUSR

In the face of challenging and novel activities or events (e.g., bungee jumping, academic competitions, new project developments), people can choose to participate or not. Decisionmaking behavior is the result of multiple factors, and assessment of risk activity is one such factor in behavioral decision-making (Zuckerman, 2007). Activity characteristics, personal characteristics, and social situation factors can also influence decision-making. The key determinants of decisionmaking include cognitive and affective states (Yuen and Lee, 2003), motivation (Ramey et al., 2016), and personality traits (Skeel et al., 2007). Personality traits can include sensation seeking (Zuckerman, 2007), openness to experience (Peterson and Seligman, 2004), and impulsiveness (Lejuez et al., 2002). Individual differences can be expected to drive effects on decision-making processes and outcomes as well as the interaction between individual differences and other factors (Appelt et al., 2011). Curiosity, optimism, and courage are all strongly associated with uncertainty or risk (Loewenstein, 1994; Lopez, 2007; Carver and Scheier, 2014). Therefore, in this article, we focus on these three psychological characteristics and risk assessment in decision-making. We propose that there are important psychological characteristics that drive people to make decisions and behave under different conditions of risk self-assessment.