Positive and Negative Emotions
Research done by Isen and Patrick put forth the theory of “mood maintenance” which states that happy decision-makers are reluctant to gamble. In other words, happy people decide against gambling, since they would not want to undermine the happy feeling.
Alternately, the influence of negative feelings at the time of decision-making was studied by Raghunathan and Tuan Pham (1999). They conducted three experiments in gambling decisions and job selection decisions, where unhappy subjects were found to prefer high-risk/high-reward options unlike anxious subjects who preferred low-risk/low-reward options. They stated that “anxiety and sadness convey distinct types of information to the decision-maker and prime different goals.” It was found that “while anxiety primes an implicit goal of uncertainty reduction, sadness primes an implicit goal of reward replacement”. Thus emotions cannot simply be classified as positive or negative as we need to consider the consequences of the emotions in ultimate decision-making. Emotions rule our decision making process.
Read more about this topic: Emotions In Decision-making
Famous quotes containing the words positive, negative and/or emotions:
“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“Our role is to support anything positive in black life and destroy anything negative that touches it. You have no other reason for being. I don’t understand art for art’s sake. Art is the guts of the people.”
—Elma Lewis (b. 1921)
“You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)