Stress Rewires Money Choices Even Among High Earners, Study Finds

When people feel stressed, their relationship with time and certainty appears to change in measurable ways, and a new study suggests that this phenomenon is not simply a byproduct of financial hardship. Researchers report that among adults earning at least $100,000 a year, higher levels of perceived stress were linked to steeper devaluation of delayed and uncertain monetary rewards, at least when the stakes were modest. The findings, published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine, offer some of the clearest evidence yet that the psychological weight of stress shapes impulsive decision-making independently of socioeconomic disadvantage, a confound that has clouded this area of research for decades.

The study focused on two fundamental processes in behavioral economics. The first, delay discounting, describes how the perceived value of a reward shrinks as its arrival is pushed into the future. A person with high delay discounting might take fifty dollars today rather than one hundred dollars in six months, effectively trading a larger outcome for immediate gratification. The second, probability discounting, captures how people devalue rewards that are uncertain. Offered a guaranteed fifty dollars or a hundred dollars with only a sixty percent chance of payout, someone with high probability discounting would gravitate toward the smaller, certain option. Both processes have been tied to a striking range of maladaptive outcomes, including tobacco and other substance use, poor adherence to preventive medical care and treatment regimens, and psychiatric conditions such as major depressive and bipolar disorders.

Perceived stress, the psychological variable at the center of the new work, is distinct from a single bad day or an acute laboratory stressor. It reflects the degree to which people experience their lives as unpredictable, uncontrollable, or overwhelming over an extended period, capturing the cumulative burden of multiple stressors. Earlier observational studies consistently found that adults and adolescents reporting greater perceived stress also showed steeper delay discounting, and similar patterns appeared in people recovering from substance use disorders. Yet experimental studies that deliberately induced acute stress, such as through public speaking or cold exposure, generally failed to reproduce the effect, leaving researchers with a puzzling inconsistency. More importantly, both perceived stress and delay discounting are reliably associated with low income and scarcity, making it difficult to tell whether stress genuinely alters decision-making or whether both simply track poverty.

To break that deadlock, the research team, led by Mary J. King of Virginia Tech alongside Michelle Rockwell, John Epling, and Jeffrey S. Stein, turned to a methodological strategy borrowed from epidemiology: restricting the sample. Instead of statistically adjusting for income after the fact, they recruited only participants whose combined household income was at least $100,000 per year, placing them roughly within the top two income quintiles in the United States. By draining most of the variability out of the income variable, the researchers effectively neutralized socioeconomic disadvantage as an alternative explanation. Participants were recruited through the online crowdsourcing platform Prolific and were further limited to adults aged 28 to 75 who worked outside medicine and related fields, because the study doubled as a comparison group for a separate investigation of primary care clinicians.

A total of 247 participants completed the survey in August 2024, with a median completion time of just under six minutes. After excluding ten participants who failed attention checks and fifteen who reported incomes below the pre-screening threshold, 222 participants remained for analysis. The sample had a median age of 48 years, a slight female majority, and a median Perceived Stress Scale score of 14, corresponding to moderate stress. The Perceived Stress Scale, a widely used ten-item instrument asking how often respondents felt nervous, overwhelmed, or in control over the past month, showed excellent internal consistency in this sample.

Discounting was measured with brief, six-trial adjusting tasks administered for two reward magnitudes, $100 and $10,000, in randomized order. In the delay discounting task, participants repeatedly chose between a smaller immediate amount and a larger delayed amount, with the delay adjusted up or down across trials until the point of indifference, expressed as an ED50, was reached. Its inverse, the rate parameter k, indexes how steeply delayed rewards lose value. The probability discounting task worked analogously, adjusting the chance of receiving a larger immediate reward until indifference, yielding the rate parameter h. Because smaller rewards are typically discounted more steeply over time while larger rewards are discounted more steeply under uncertainty, testing both magnitudes provided an internal validity check: the classic magnitude effects were indeed replicated, confirming the tasks behaved as expected.

The results were strikingly selective. For the $100 rewards, perceived stress significantly predicted steeper delay discounting in both univariate and multiple regression models that controlled for age, education, gender, and household income. The same held true for probability discounting at $100, where higher stress scores were associated with greater devaluation of uncertain rewards. At the $10,000 magnitude, however, perceived stress lost its association with both delay and probability discounting entirely. The researchers suggest this magnitude-specific pattern may reflect the more extreme discounting rates observed for large rewards, which can compress the range of individual differences and reduce sensitivity to modest cross-sectional effects. Notably, the association between stress and probability discounting at $100 did not fully survive a sensitivity analysis that retained outlier participants, a caveat the authors acknowledge.

One demographic factor proved more durable than stress. Across both reward magnitudes, female participants showed higher probability discounting than male participants, preferring smaller, guaranteed rewards over larger, uncertain ones. This aligns with prior findings of gender differences in decision-making under uncertainty, although the literature on gender and delay discounting remains less consistent. The persistence of the gender effect at magnitudes where the stress effect vanished underscores that different psychological and demographic influences on risky choice may operate at different scales of reward.

The study’s limitations are worth noting. The cross-sectional design precludes any claim about causality or temporal ordering, and the sample was drawn entirely from a research volunteer platform and restricted to non-healthcare workers with high incomes, limiting generalizability. The brief probability discounting task has received less validation than its delay counterpart, though its successful replication of the magnitude effect lends credibility. The authors also caution that their analyses did not adjust for multiple comparisons, and they call for future longitudinal work across diverse populations, income levels, and geographic regions, where cost of living may translate identical salaries into very different financial realities.

Even with those caveats, the implications are substantial. Health-related decisions, from smoking cessation to medication adherence, hinge on how individuals weigh immediate certainty against delayed or probabilistic benefit. If the everyday experience of stress nudges people toward impatience and risk aversion even in financially secure populations, then stress management could represent an underappreciated target for interventions designed to improve long-term health behavior. What this study establishes is that the well-documented link between stress and impulsive choice is not merely poverty wearing a psychological disguise; it persists where economic hardship is largely absent, provided the rewards on the table are small enough to feel like everyday money.

Subject of Research: The relationship between perceived stress and delay and probability discounting in a high-income adult sample

Article Title: Examining relationships between delay and probability discounting and perceived stress in a high-income online sample

Article References: King, M. J., Rockwell, M., Epling, J., & Stein, J. S. (2026). Examining relationships between delay and probability discounting and perceived stress in a high-income online sample. Journal of Behavioral Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-026-00711-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10865-026-00711-0

Keywords: delay discounting, probability discounting, perceived stress, decision-making, behavioral economics, impulsivity, income, Prolific, health behavior, Journal of Behavioral Medicine, reward magnitude, gender differences