An Integrative Process Approach on Judgment and Decision Making: The Impact of Arousal, Affect, Motivation, and Cognitive Ability

Abstract

This article aims to integrate the findings from various research traditions on human judgment and decision making, focusing on four process variables: arousal, affect, motivation, and cognitive capacity/ ability. We advocate a broad perspective referred to as the integrative process approach (IPA) of decision making, in which these process variables explain the effects of dispositional and situational input variables on information processing and decision making. From this integration, underinvestigated issues that represent promising avenues for future research are delineated, and the merits of the present approach for a more refined interpretation of previous research on judgment and decision making are discussed. We argue that the simultaneous consideration of the various process variables is crucial to advance our insight in this important domain of inquiry.Key words: motivation, arousal, emotion, cognition, judgment, model Human judgment and decision making has attracted considerable research attention in various disciplines within psychology. The term decision making generates over 25,000 hits in the Social Sciences Citation Index for the last 30 years in the psychological research domain, with an exponential increase in publications during the last decade. Numerous models and theories have been formulated in this broad domain, and recently, the need to integrate this flood of different perspectives has become a very prominent issue in the literature. In the past few years, various authors have made valuable contributions to construct broad models of judgment and decision making that integrate a number of research lines without claiming to be all-inclusive (e.g., Deutsch & Strack, 2006;Forgas, 1995;Kruglanski, Erb, Pierro, Mannetti, & Chun, 2006;Kruglanski, Pierro, Mannetti, Erb, & Chun, 2007;Sherman, 2006). The present article aims to contribute to this quest for integration by developing an overview perspective that incorporates several broad but complementary research traditions that have focused on "withinindividual" influences on decision making and judgment. 498RoETS AND VAN HIEl Within the vast literature on human decision making and judgment, different research traditions have addressed the influence of arousal, cognitive ability, motivation, and affect. Early theorizing and research (e.g., Yerkes & Dodson, 1908;Easterbrook, 1959) demonstrated the impact of arousal but also paved the way for more recent perspectives on decision making that emphasize cognitive capacity/ability (for an overview, see Staal, 2004), motivation (e.g., Kruglanski & Webster, 1996), and affect (e.g., Bodenhausen, Kramer, & Süsser, 1994;Forgas, 1995). However, the absence of a general, conceptual synthesis of the well-established impact of these four key variables is remarkable. Thus, we explicitly aimed to provide a broad perspective that incorporates the four different process variables in decision making, with a strong focus on the relationships and the interplay among these processes. our goal was to provide a genera...

Reviewing the Role of Cognitive Load, Expertise Level, Motivation, and Unconscious Processing in Working Memory Performance

“…The abovementioned findings substantiate the "Integrative Process Approach" proposed by Roets and Van Hiel (2011a). This approach provides new insights into the dynamic interplay between learners' affect, motivation, and cognitive capacity, which are "the most proximal process variables directly affecting information processing" (Roets & Van Hiel, 2011a, p. 510).…”

How Do Students Shift from Task-Related to Task-Unrelated Thoughts?

“…As a result, there is a dynamic interplay between affect, motivation, and cognition; a negative affective stimulus can trigger related cognition (evoking mode-congruent thoughts), thereby defocusing attention and reducing both informationprocessing time and attentional capacity for task-related thoughts (Roets & Van Hiel, 2011). On one hand, therefore, deliberate attempts to develop thoughts related to positive emotional states (e.g., happiness) may involve suppression of other thoughts related to the counterparts (e.g., sadness).…”

Greater Cognitive Effort for Better Learning: Tailoring an Instructional Design for Learners with Different Levels of Knowledge and Motivation

“…Roets and colleagues ( 2013 ) further maintained that the interaction effect between motivation and cognitive capacity on information processing is primarily determined by quality (i.e., subjective perception of usefulness of sampled information for task performance) rather than quantity (i.e., the amount of sampled information) of information. An increased amount of information as a result of motivation may negatively influence the perception of its usefulness (relevance, value, or informativeness) and thus be detrimental to task performance ( Roets et al, 2013 ; Roets & Van Hiel, 2011a ). However, as long as satisfactory performance in a cognitive task is perceived to be possible, high motivation leading to an increase in the amount of sampled information may, to some degree, compensate for low cognitive capacity ( Roets et al, 2008 , 2013 ).…”

“…However, the extent to which motivational factors determine the use of working memory capacity needs to be clarified ( De Jong, 2010 ). To shed light on this issue, Roets and Van Hiel ( 2011a ) argued that the interplay between cognitive capacity, affect, and motivation should be taken into account.…”