The effect of emotion and time pressure on risk decision-making

Abstract

Emotion and time pressure are two important factors affecting risk decision-making. This study explored the interaction of emotion and time pressure on risk decision-making by adopting 3 (emotion state: positive emotion, negative emotion, and control group) × 2 (time constraint: high time constraint and no time constraint) between-subject experiment design. The results showed that (1) both emotion and time pressure exerted significant effect on risk decision-making (generally, positive emotion renders participants more risk prone than negative emotion, and high time pressure promotes people more risk seeking than no time pressure); (2) time pressure polarized the effects of different emotions on risk decision-making. As effects of emotions were polarized under high time pressure, two distinct cognitive pathways may function in human decision-making. Based on our experimental result and previous neuroeconomic works, we proposed a novel dual cognitive pathways model to explain phenomenon in the current article.

Keywords:

• emotion
• time pressure
• risk decision-making
• neuroeconomics model

Acknowledgments

Yixin Hu, Dawei Wang, and Kaiyuan Pang contributed equally to this paper and are joint first authors. The work was supported by the Funds for Young People of Humanities and Social sciences of the Ministry of Education of China [grant number 10YJCXLX043] and the Overseas Fund of East China Normal University and ‘the 12th Five’ Emphasis Subject of Development and Education Psychology of Shandong Province of China and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation fund (Project No. 2011M500426), and National Natural Science Fund (Project No. 71272156). We also wish to thank Siqi Cheng for improving the English wording.