Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decisionmaking?: A Hedgefoxian Perspective

2. Affect-Based Evaluation and Regulation as Mediators of Behavior: The Role of Affect in Risk Taking, Helping, and Eating Patterns

• 2 • Affect-Based Evaluation and Regulation as Mediators of Behavior: The Role of Affect in Risk Taking, Helping, and Eating Patterns EDUARDO B. ANDRADE AND JOEL B. COHEN CONSIDER THE following dilemma: To get people’s attention and motivate action, a charity organization decides to use vivid pictures of orphaned and starving children in Africa along with somber background music. A primary research stream within the affect literature suggests, first, that such stimuli are likely to put people in a bad mood and that bad moods produce mood congruent information retrieval and explanatory attributional processes (for example, “I guess I didn’t like the appeal”), all of which could work to the disadvantage of the charity. However, a second research stream proposes that people in bad moods pursue strategies likely to improve their moods, so people could feel much better if they called the charity and made a donation to help the children. But which of these opposing outcomes is most likely to occur? In this chapter we apply a unified theoretical conceptualization (Andrade 2005) that relates both informational and goal-directed properties of affect to three important substantive research streams: risk taking, helping others, and eating patterns. These behaviors have not previously been brought together to observe their common affective underpinnings. 35 We propose that the integration of these two established affective mechanisms —where informational aspects are treated as affective evaluation (AE) and goal-directed aspects are treated as affect regulation (AR)— can help us account for many of the findings linking affect to observed differences in these behavioral domains. In the previous example, the AE mechanism works against calling the charity, as negative aspects of donating money (for example, fraud or failure to have a meaningful impact) become more salient as one experiences a more negative affective state. However, if donating money is perceived as a mood-lifting opportunity, the AR mechanism comes into play and may reverse the effect. As we will explain, positive affect produces mirror-image effects. It encourages behavioral activity via the affective evaluation mechanism . Donating money may seem easier (it would possibly lead to fewer “rainy day” thoughts) and more appealing when one is happy. However, when mood threatening cues are made salient (for example, risks of providing too much information over the phone), the effects reverse due to the impact of the affect regulation mechanism. In this case, AR leads people to protect their current positive feelings. Thus, this chapter focuses on a broader understanding of the behavioral consequences of positive and negative feeling states, and how two general affect-related mediating mechanisms interact with one another to influence individual decision making. Contrary to other chapters in this volume (for example, Baumeister, DeWall, and Zhang, chapter 1), the proposed framework does not make general normative judgments about a particular affect-driven (or biased) choice. The reason is twofold: First, helping, eating, or taking risks are not necessarily appropriate or inappropriate behavioral activities by default. Second, whether affect will help or hurt decision making will depend on whether the combination of its informational and goal-directed properties leads to better outcomes than would follow from some other decision heuristic. Affective Evaluation and Affect Regulation A fundamental aspect of affective states is their ability to stimulate or discourage behavior (Frijda 1999). However, it is clear that no unique pattern of behavior can be expected from a valenced affective state: positive affect has been shown to both stimulate and mitigate risk taking and helping, just as negative affect has been shown to both encourage and discourage helping and food intake. While each of the three substantive domains we examine has important distinguishing characteristics, we believe this integrative conceptual approach may provide a parsimonious account of how affect influences behavior both here and elsewhere. 36 Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? Studies examining the behavioral consequences of affect have, surprisingly , received very limited attention. There has been much more extensive research on the impact of affect on memory, information processing , and judgments and attitudes (Martin and Clore 2001) than on the impact of affect on choices and behavioral activities. For example, Norbert Schwarz and Gerald L. Clore’s (1996) twenty-seven page review of the affect literature in social psychology allocated about half of a page to the impact of feelings on behavior: “As reflected in this review, most of the research has focused on the influence of feelings on cognitive processing . Attention...