Delay Discounting & the Acquired Brain Injury

Brain injuries, of any type, can lead to long term and adverse health complications. For individuals who suffer from an acquired brain injury, often from a traumatic event, there can be a significant change to personality and behavioral characteristics from the first day post-injury.

One of the most common traits seen in those individuals with acquired brain injury involves the lack of inhibition, the lack of impulse control and the general lack of self-control. Without proper management and treatment, including psychological and medical, these types of behavior traits can lead to the development of illegal behaviors including theft, and may even result in abnormal social behaviors including sexual aggression and impulsive shopping.

If you are caring for a loved one who has experienced an acquired brain injury, it is important to understand the dynamic of behavior and personality changes that may occur. Because the leading factor of many adverse behaviors lies in the origins of impulsivity, your loved one should be assessed for this unique complication. In the acquired brain injury, the development of impulsivity results in the individual's inability to gauge short term benefits and consequences from long-term benefits and consequences. This inability to differentiate and understand the outcome of delayed actions is known as "delay discounting".

Delay discounting involves the realm by which we gauge the advantages and disadvantages of specific behaviors. Analyzing reward and benefits, individuals with acquired brain injury need to be assessed for their degree of delay discounting. If found to have a significantly high degrees of delay discounting, your care for this individual may be far more complex that simply managing the daily health care needs. In fact, with a high level of delay discounting, you can expect there will be many social issues that will need to be addressed as well.