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Incidental emotions associated with uncertainty appraisals impair decisions in the Iowa Gambling Task

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Abstract

With the Appraisal Tendency Framework, it has been established that (un)certainty appraisals associated with incidental emotions trigger the kind of information processing to cope with situation. We tested the impact of (un)certainty-associated emotions on a sequential task, the Iowa Gambling Task. In this task, intuitive processing is necessary to lead participants to rely on emotional cues arising from previous decisions and to making advantageous decisions. We predicted that certainty-associated emotions would engage participants in intuitive processing, whereas uncertainty-associated emotions would engage them in deliberative processing and lead them to make disadvantageous decisions. As expected, we observed in two distinct experiments, that participants induced to feel uncertainty (fear, sadness) were found to decide less advantageously than participants induced to feel certainty (anger, happiness, disgust).

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Notes

  1. Mood refers to a vague state, less intense and lacking a specific cause, whereas emotion is a more specific state, more intense (Ekman 1984) and with a clear target (Frijda 1986). The source of the emotional state is salient and so the term “emotion” seems more accurate here, given the procedure the authors used (film clips), than the term “mood”.

  2. A set of experiments was conducted by using the standard IGT (Bechara et al. 1994). However, the results of these experiments carried out with French participants, did not replicate those in the literature. An investigation revealed that the participants did not try to find a strategy. Consequently, for the purposes of the present study the task was presented as a computerized stock-market investment simulation in order to mask the gambling connotations and encourage the participants to develop strategies that would lead them to decide advantageously. Participants had to earn a minimum of €3,750, and warned them that they would receive a score of their reasoning abilities as feedback. This manipulation was expected to ensure the participants would focus on the task and led to reproduce the classical results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Interuniversitaire de Psychologie, Université de Savoie, BP 1104, 73011, Chambéry Cedex, France

    Virginie Bagneux & Thierry Bollon

  2. Clermont Université, Université Blaise Pascal, LAPSCO, CNRS UMR 6024, Clermont-Ferrand, France

    Hélène Font

Authors
  1. Virginie Bagneux
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  2. Hélène Font
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  3. Thierry Bollon
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Correspondence to Virginie Bagneux.

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Bagneux, V., Font, H. & Bollon, T. Incidental emotions associated with uncertainty appraisals impair decisions in the Iowa Gambling Task. Motiv Emot 37, 818–827 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-013-9346-5

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