Purpose. Little research exists on the influence of emotion in forensic settings. To start filling this gap, we used a hypothetical interrogation scenario to examine the effects of emotional state on judgement, decision making, and information-processing style across two separate experiments. Methods. The participants were induced a specific emotion. Then, they read a scenario where a suspect was arrested and rated (1) the suspect's guilt, and (2) the extent to which they would use a number of tactics to interview the suspect. Based on the feelings-asinformation theory and cognitive-appraisal theories of emotion, we predicted that relative to angry or happy participants, sad participants would be less inclined to judge the suspect as guilty (judgement), would show a stronger tendency to select benevolent interrogation tactics and a weaker tendency to select hostile interrogation tactics (decision making), and would be more likely to use an analytic (rather than a heuristic) processing style. Results. In Experiment 1 (conducted with college students), the judgement hypothesis was supported. In Experiment 2 (with mTurkers), the decision-making hypothesis was supported. A meta-analysis of the two experiments revealed that participants were more willing to select benevolent than hostile interrogation tactics and that, as predicted, sad participants were more willing than angry or happy participants to select benevolent tactics. However, emotion did not affect the participants' tendency to select hostile tactics. Conclusion. We tested emotion theories in an interrogation scenario. The significant results were consistent with the feelings-as-information and cognitive-appraisal theories of emotion and have practical relevance.
When recalling autobiographical events, people retrieve not only the event details, but also the feelings they experienced. Past work with different measures of memories for feelings remain inconclusive, suggesting that people are either highly consistent or inconsistent with remembering feelings. The current study examined whether people are able to consistently recall the intensity of previous feelings associated with consequential and negatively valenced emotional events, i.e., the 9/11 attack (N = 769) and Covid-19 pandemic (N = 726). By comparing the initial and recalled intensities of negative feelings, we found that people systematically recall more intense negative feelings than they initially reported – overestimating the intensity of past negative emotional experience. The Covid-19 dataset further showed that people whose emotional well-being improved more demonstrate smaller biases in remembered feelings. Across both datasets, the remembered intensity of feelings correlated with initial feelings and were also influenced by current feelings, although the impact of the current feelings was stronger in the Covid-19 dataset than the 9/11 dataset. Our results suggest that when recalling negative autobiographical events, people tend to overestimate the intensity of experienced negative emotional experience with the degree of bias influenced by current feelings and well-being.
Exploration is an important part of decision making and is crucial to maximizing long-term reward. Past work has shown that people use different forms of uncertainty to guide exploration. In this study, we investigate the role of the pupil-linked arousal system in uncertainty-guided exploration. We measured participants’ pupil dilation (N = 48) while they performed a two- armed bandit task. Consistent with previous work, we found that people adopted a hybrid of directed, random and undirected exploration, which are sensitive to relative uncertainty, total uncertainty and value difference between options, respectively. We also found a positive correlation between pupil size and total uncertainty. Furthermore, augmenting the choice model with subject-specific total uncertainty estimates decoded from the pupil size improved predictions of held-out choices, suggesting that people used the uncertainty estimate encoded in pupil size to decide which option to explore Together, the data shed light on the computations underlying uncertainty-driven exploration. Under the assumption that pupil size reflects Locus Coeruleus-Norepinephrine (LC-NE) neuromodulatory activity, these results also extend the theory of LC-NE function in exploration, highlighting its selective role in driving uncertainty- guided random exploration.
Cognitive appraisal theory predicts that emotions affect participation decisions around risky collective action. However, little existing research has attempted to parse out the mechanisms by which this process occurs. We build a global game of regime change and discuss the effects that fear may have on participation through pessimism about the state of the world, other players’ willingness to participate, and risk aversion. We test the behavioral effects of fear in this game by conducting 32 sessions of an experiment in two labs where participants are randomly assigned to an emotion induction procedure. In some rounds of the game, potential mechanisms are shut down to identify their contribution to the overall effect of fear. Our results show that in this context, fear does not affect willingness to participate. This finding highlights the importance of context, including integral versus incidental emotions and the size of the stakes, in shaping effect of emotions on behavior.
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