7. Emotion and Decision Making

Question 1

Injuries to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a key area of the brain for integrating emotion and cognition, will reduce what in regards to decision and emotion?

Answer 1

Both patients’ ability to feel emotion and the quality of their decision

Question 2

What did the work of Johnson & Tversky (1938) “Emotional carryover effect” demonstrate?

Answer 2

Participants who read negative stories offered pessimistic estimates of fatalities - the mood itself generally affected all judgements

Question 3

A mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind - what is this?

Answer 3

Availability Heuristic

Question 4

What happened when Lichtenstein, Slovic, Fischhoff, Layman, and Combs (1978) asked lay people to estimate the number of deaths per year that are due to various hazards?

Answer 4

There was a significant tendency to overestimate infrequent causes of death while underestimating more frequent causes - Availability Heuristic

Question 5

What happened when Schwarz et al (1983) asked participants to attribute their present feelings to the rain?

Answer 5

The negative impact of bad moods was eliminated

Question 6

In Jonauskaite, D. et al. (2019), what were the two best predictors of how people felt about the colour yellow?

Answer 6

The annual amount of rainfall and how fair they lived from the equator

Question 7

In finance, what is sunshine strongly correlated with?

Answer 7

stock returns

Question 8

Bollen, J., Mao, H., & Pepe, A. (2011) performed sentiment analysis of all tweets published on twitter in 2008 and extracted six mood states (tension, depression, anger, vigour, fatigue, confusion), what were the findings?

Answer 8

Events in the social, political, cultural and economic sphere do have a significant, immediate, and highly specific effect on the various dimension of public mood

Question 9

What are the two types of risk in the modern world?

Answer 9

Risk as feelings and risk as analysis

Question 10

What is meant by risk as feelings?

Answer 10

Individuals’ fast, instinctive, and intuitive reactions to danger. Reliance on risk as feelings is described with “the affect heuristic

Question 11

What is meant by risk as analysis?

Answer 11

Brings logic, reason and scientific deliberation to bear on risk management

Question 12

What are affect heuristics?

Answer 12

A “mental shortcut” where our affect influences our decisions. It is a subconscious process used while judging the risks and benefits of something, depending on the positive or negative feelings that people associate with a stimulus (“gut feeling”)

Question 13

Zajonc (1980) argued that affective reactions to stimuli are often the very first reactions, occurring automatically and subsequently guiding information processing and judgment. If Zajonc is correct, then affective reactions may serve as…

Answer 13

…orienting mechanisms, helping individuals make decisions quickly and efficiently

Question 14

Researchers now recognize that the experiential (affective) mode of thinking and the analytic mode of thinking are continually active - true or false?

Answer 14

True

Question 15

Affect heuristics: when in a positive state, or our feelings towards an activity are favourable, we are more likely to perceive the activity as having ** benefits and *** risks

Answer 15

high and low

Question 16

What emotional state makes it more likely for us to try more things?

Answer 16

Positive

Question 17

Hsee (1998) found that an over filled ice cream container with 7 oz. of ice cream was valued more highly (measured by willingness to pay) than an under filled container with 8 oz. of ice cream. What happened when the options were evaluated together?

Answer 17

The ‘less is better’ effect reversed - the proportion of the serving cup that was filled appeared to be more valuable than the absolute amount of ice cream

Question 18

In Finucane et al. (2000), participants were shown statements on nuclear power. What was the outcome?

Answer 18

An inverse relationship between benefit and risk was observed, partially by reference to the affect heuristic

Question 19

According to a dual process theory, individuals apprehend reality by two interactive, parallel processing systems, what are they?

Answer 19

The rational system, and the experiential system

Question 20

In a dual process model of emotion and decision making, what is the rational system?

Answer 20

A deliberative, analytical system that functions by way of established rules of logic and evidence (e.g., probability theory)

Question 21

In a dual process model of emotion and decision making, what is the experiential system?

Answer 21

Encodes reality in images, metaphors, and narratives to which affective feelings have become attached

Question 22

When Denes-Raj and Epstein (1994) showed that, when offered a chance to win $1 by drawing a red jelly bean from 2 urns, a bowl containing a greater absolute number, but a smaller proportion, of red beans (e.g., 7 in 100) and a than from a bowl with fewer red beans but a better probability of winning (e.g., 1 in 10), what happened?

Answer 22

Participants often chose the bowl with the greater absolute number - these individuals reported that, although they knew the probabilities were against them, they felt they had a better chance when there were more red beans. This is a demonstration of the experiential system in action

Question 23

When experts were asked to decide whether or not to discharge a patient, which statement resulted in more refusals to discharge?

1. “20 out of every 100 patients similar to Mr. Jones are estimated to commit an act of violence”
2. “Patients similar to Mr. Jones are estimated to have a 20% chance of committing an act of violence`”

Answer 23

Statement 1, the absolute risk

Question 24

What is reappraisal?

Answer 24

Reframing the meaning of stimuli that led to an emotional response

Question 25

The simplest strategy for minimising emotional magnitude is to do what before making a decision?

Answer 25

Let time pass

Question 26

What is affective forecasting?

Answer 26

Predicting how we will feel at some point in the future

Question 27

We are quite good in estimating how we will feel if a future event is to come true, but we are not so good in predicting how positive or negative we will feel or …

Answer 27

… how long we would feel that way

Question 28

What is impact bias?

Answer 28

The overestimation of the intensity and duration of our emotional reaction

Question 29

What is the psychological immune system?

Answer 29

The system of cognitive mechanisms that ameliorate our experience of negative affect

Question 30

Our quick recovery from negative events is largely due to our unconscious defence mechanism - what is this?

Answer 30

Psychological immune system

Question 31

Consumersshoppingatanupscalegrocerystoreencounteredatastingbooththatdisplayed either alimited(6)oranextensive(24)selectionofdifferentflavorsofjam - what was the outcome of initial attraction and purchasing behaviour?

Answer 31

More people stopped by when there was extensive selection, but there were less purchases