They made a research with stock investors for 20 days, who had to rate their feelings on an internet web site while making investment decisions each day. Individuals who were better able to identify and distinguish among their current feelings achieve higher decision- making performance via their enhaced ability to control the possible biases induced by those feelings.
The theory was that investors had to keep their feelings under control in order to take decisions.
Emotionally is an opposite for rationality?
Some argue that feelings are a source of unwanted bias, need to be properly regulated. Other say that feelings play an adaptive role in decision-making and benefit personal well being.
The research position is the following- whether affective feelings are functional or dysfunctional for decision making is largely dependent upon how people experience those feelings and what they do about them during decision making.
Proposal- individuals can experience intense feelings during decision making while simultaneously regulating the possible biases induced by those feelings, both of which may positively contribute to their decision- making performance.
This study extends previous research on affect and decision making in three ways
1. It provides direct empirical evidence regarding how feelings influence individuals’ decision-making performance in a high fidelity simulation that simultaneously captures the aspects of psychological realism and the benefits of experiments.
2. We examine contrasting perspectives in the literature – the potentially functional and dysfunctional bias inducing roles of feelings in decision-making.
3. The degree to which affective feelings are functional and dysfunctional for decision-making varies considerably between individuals in a predictable way.
Feelings: broad term that refers to various affective states, including mood, not associated with a particular object, and discrete emotions, directed toward certain objects, such as anger and fear.
Feelings can affect the content of information retrieved in the brain during decision -making.
Momentary feelings influence various social judgments.
People tend to make judgements that are consistent with their affective stats at the time of judgment.
Affective feelings can directly bias individual choices. (intense unpleasant feelings often lead people to favor short- term enhacements, focusing on what is best in the moment, regardless of possibly negative long-term consequences).
There are ways in which feelings can facilitate decision making.
Affective reaction is a core driver of conscious attention and allocation of working memory.
An important function of momentary feelings is to shift attention from less pressing goals to more urgent ones.
Feelings can facilitate the decision-making processes involved in selecting and prioritizing choices relevant to situational requirements.
Decision making comes with infinite factors and options each with conflicting advantages and disadvantages, making it extremely impossible to make an optimal decision within a given time frame.
One always relates the decision with relative goodness or badness for our personal well-being.
People in affective states tend to categorize stimuli in a broader more inclusive and more flexible fashion which often enhances creativity and performance on complex tasks.
People in unpleasant affective states tend to engage in more effortful, systematic, piecemeal information processing, which leads to effective decision making when decisions require accurate, unbiased and realistic judgments or systematic execution of a structured decision protocol.
Reconciliation: Individual Differences in Affective Information Processing
Affective experiece has the potential to help and hurt those making important decisions.
Affective feelings can be determined by how individuals experience and handle those feelings in more or less functional or dysfunctional ways.
Difference in affective information processing.
Not only to experience the feelings but what we do with those feelings – to the extent to which they attend to the information feelings convey and integrate it into their judgments, decisions, and behaviors.
This framework suggests that how people experience their feelings and what they do with their feelings are conceptually separate and relatively independent processes.
A number of studies have evidenced that the bias-inducing effects of feelings disappear when people attribute their current feelings to the correct causes.
The effects of feelings depend on how people handle those feelings during decision-making.
Individuals who are more attentive to and better able to identify and distinguish among their current affective states- instead of ignoring them or viewing them globally are likely to better regulate the possibly bias- generating effects of their affective feelings during decision making.
ndividuals who are more
As a result, more emotionally differentiated individuals will achieve higher decision-making performance via their enhanced ability to regulate their affective influence on their decisions.
This argument leads them to a hypothesize which I most agree with which is that affective influence regulation mediates the relationship between emotion differentiation and decision-making performance.
When emotions are felt they must be annotated momentarily- because in that moment they have been biased.
First, individuals often experience more pressure to understand and actively regulate their emotions when they experience negative rather than positive emotions
positive, it is not significant (b 0.58, t 1.22). However, the path coefficient from negative emotion differentiation to affective influence regulation (path d) is both positive and significant (b 0.85,t 2.33, p 0.05); participants who reported their negative affective feelings in a more differentiated fashion were less influenced by their affective feelings in determining the level of risk in their daily stock portfolio.
Hypothesis 4 only partially supported; affective influence regulation fully mediates the effect of negative, but not positive, emotion differentiation on decision performance “Don’t let your emotions run your life,” however, we found that individuals who better kept their feelings from having direct impacts on their decisions achieved higher decision-making performance. This result confirms the dominant view in the literature on affect and decision making that affective experiences produce various biases in judgments and choices that must be properly regulated to enhance decision-making performance. Yet the popular prescription for successful emotion regulation, “Ignore your emotions,” appears, in view of our results, not to be the right answer for effective regulation of feelings and their influence on decision making. Instead, the results suggest exactly the opposite: individuals who better understood what was going on with their feelings during decision making and thus reported them in a more specific and differentiated fashion were more successful in regulating the feelings’ influence on decision making and, as a result, achieved higher investment returns.
This study suggests that both feelings and the ways people handle them during decision making have important consequences
for decision-making outcomes. In particular, the results showed a strong support for an alternative view that feelings and emotions can enable and facilitate decision-making processes.
experiencing feelings (a functional process) and doing something with those feelings (a dysfunctional process) may be mutually independent within an individual.
emotional intelligence is “one’s ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions”
This study provides empirical evidence that emotion differentiation and affective influence regulation are two essential process components of emotional intelligence (Barrett& Gross, 2001) that positive emotion differentiation led to greater self-regulation of emotions.
Instead, better performers were more attentive to their current feeling states and better able to describe them clearly during decision making. In particular, the better performers could better distinguish among their negative feeling states, where the press for affective regulation is greatest
However, a more challenging issue is how to minimize the possibly negative influences of affective feelings, once affective experience and expression
became more encouraged and less constrained in workplaces.
This can be achieved by conducting frequent self-audits (Forgas & Ciarrochi, 2002) of current feelings during decision making—asking oneself, for instance, “How am I
feeling right now?” and trying to precisely describe current feelings and understand why they are being experienced. Employees and managers might also attempt to increase their general levels of emotional self-awareness
This result suggests that self-esteem positively moderates the relationship between negative emotion differentiation and affective influence regulation by helping individuals generate counter emotional (positive) thoughts once they have experienced negative feelings and consciously recognized them.
Feelings are an indispensable part of people’s individual and organizational lives and, more importantly, powerful entities that can both benefit and harm choices and decisions. Yet the popular approach has predominantly focused on understanding and minimizing the dysfunctional aspects of feelings. This study not only suggests that whether they are actually beneficial or harmful to decisions may largely depend upon how people experience, treat, and use their feelings during decision making, but also points to an alternative 936 Academy of Management Journal August approach in which both functional and dysfunctional
effects of feelings are equally acknowledged and simultaneously managed to maximize their positive effects and minimize their negative effects.
We invite more scholarly investigation of this alternative approach and the ways in which it can be applied to various individual and organizational practices.
The theory was that investors had to keep their feelings under control in order to take decisions.
Emotionally is an opposite for rationality?
Some argue that feelings are a source of unwanted bias, need to be properly regulated. Other say that feelings play an adaptive role in decision-making and benefit personal well being.
The research position is the following- whether affective feelings are functional or dysfunctional for decision making is largely dependent upon how people experience those feelings and what they do about them during decision making.
Proposal- individuals can experience intense feelings during decision making while simultaneously regulating the possible biases induced by those feelings, both of which may positively contribute to their decision- making performance.
This study extends previous research on affect and decision making in three ways
1. It provides direct empirical evidence regarding how feelings influence individuals’ decision-making performance in a high fidelity simulation that simultaneously captures the aspects of psychological realism and the benefits of experiments.
2. We examine contrasting perspectives in the literature – the potentially functional and dysfunctional bias inducing roles of feelings in decision-making.
3. The degree to which affective feelings are functional and dysfunctional for decision-making varies considerably between individuals in a predictable way.
Feelings: broad term that refers to various affective states, including mood, not associated with a particular object, and discrete emotions, directed toward certain objects, such as anger and fear.
Feelings can affect the content of information retrieved in the brain during decision -making.
Momentary feelings influence various social judgments.
People tend to make judgements that are consistent with their affective stats at the time of judgment.
Affective feelings can directly bias individual choices. (intense unpleasant feelings often lead people to favor short- term enhacements, focusing on what is best in the moment, regardless of possibly negative long-term consequences).
There are ways in which feelings can facilitate decision making.
Affective reaction is a core driver of conscious attention and allocation of working memory.
An important function of momentary feelings is to shift attention from less pressing goals to more urgent ones.
Feelings can facilitate the decision-making processes involved in selecting and prioritizing choices relevant to situational requirements.
Decision making comes with infinite factors and options each with conflicting advantages and disadvantages, making it extremely impossible to make an optimal decision within a given time frame.
One always relates the decision with relative goodness or badness for our personal well-being.
People in affective states tend to categorize stimuli in a broader more inclusive and more flexible fashion which often enhances creativity and performance on complex tasks.
People in unpleasant affective states tend to engage in more effortful, systematic, piecemeal information processing, which leads to effective decision making when decisions require accurate, unbiased and realistic judgments or systematic execution of a structured decision protocol.
Reconciliation: Individual Differences in Affective Information Processing
Affective experiece has the potential to help and hurt those making important decisions.
Affective feelings can be determined by how individuals experience and handle those feelings in more or less functional or dysfunctional ways.
Difference in affective information processing.
Not only to experience the feelings but what we do with those feelings – to the extent to which they attend to the information feelings convey and integrate it into their judgments, decisions, and behaviors.
This framework suggests that how people experience their feelings and what they do with their feelings are conceptually separate and relatively independent processes.
A number of studies have evidenced that the bias-inducing effects of feelings disappear when people attribute their current feelings to the correct causes.
The effects of feelings depend on how people handle those feelings during decision-making.
Individuals who are more attentive to and better able to identify and distinguish among their current affective states- instead of ignoring them or viewing them globally are likely to better regulate the possibly bias- generating effects of their affective feelings during decision making.
ndividuals who are more
As a result, more emotionally differentiated individuals will achieve higher decision-making performance via their enhanced ability to regulate their affective influence on their decisions.
This argument leads them to a hypothesize which I most agree with which is that affective influence regulation mediates the relationship between emotion differentiation and decision-making performance.
When emotions are felt they must be annotated momentarily- because in that moment they have been biased.
First, individuals often experience more pressure to understand and actively regulate their emotions when they experience negative rather than positive emotions
positive, it is not significant (b 0.58, t 1.22). However, the path coefficient from negative emotion differentiation to affective influence regulation (path d) is both positive and significant (b 0.85,t 2.33, p 0.05); participants who reported their negative affective feelings in a more differentiated fashion were less influenced by their affective feelings in determining the level of risk in their daily stock portfolio.
Hypothesis 4 only partially supported; affective influence regulation fully mediates the effect of negative, but not positive, emotion differentiation on decision performance “Don’t let your emotions run your life,” however, we found that individuals who better kept their feelings from having direct impacts on their decisions achieved higher decision-making performance. This result confirms the dominant view in the literature on affect and decision making that affective experiences produce various biases in judgments and choices that must be properly regulated to enhance decision-making performance. Yet the popular prescription for successful emotion regulation, “Ignore your emotions,” appears, in view of our results, not to be the right answer for effective regulation of feelings and their influence on decision making. Instead, the results suggest exactly the opposite: individuals who better understood what was going on with their feelings during decision making and thus reported them in a more specific and differentiated fashion were more successful in regulating the feelings’ influence on decision making and, as a result, achieved higher investment returns.
This study suggests that both feelings and the ways people handle them during decision making have important consequences
for decision-making outcomes. In particular, the results showed a strong support for an alternative view that feelings and emotions can enable and facilitate decision-making processes.
experiencing feelings (a functional process) and doing something with those feelings (a dysfunctional process) may be mutually independent within an individual.
emotional intelligence is “one’s ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions”
This study provides empirical evidence that emotion differentiation and affective influence regulation are two essential process components of emotional intelligence (Barrett& Gross, 2001) that positive emotion differentiation led to greater self-regulation of emotions.
Instead, better performers were more attentive to their current feeling states and better able to describe them clearly during decision making. In particular, the better performers could better distinguish among their negative feeling states, where the press for affective regulation is greatest
However, a more challenging issue is how to minimize the possibly negative influences of affective feelings, once affective experience and expression
became more encouraged and less constrained in workplaces.
This can be achieved by conducting frequent self-audits (Forgas & Ciarrochi, 2002) of current feelings during decision making—asking oneself, for instance, “How am I
feeling right now?” and trying to precisely describe current feelings and understand why they are being experienced. Employees and managers might also attempt to increase their general levels of emotional self-awareness
This result suggests that self-esteem positively moderates the relationship between negative emotion differentiation and affective influence regulation by helping individuals generate counter emotional (positive) thoughts once they have experienced negative feelings and consciously recognized them.
Feelings are an indispensable part of people’s individual and organizational lives and, more importantly, powerful entities that can both benefit and harm choices and decisions. Yet the popular approach has predominantly focused on understanding and minimizing the dysfunctional aspects of feelings. This study not only suggests that whether they are actually beneficial or harmful to decisions may largely depend upon how people experience, treat, and use their feelings during decision making, but also points to an alternative 936 Academy of Management Journal August approach in which both functional and dysfunctional
effects of feelings are equally acknowledged and simultaneously managed to maximize their positive effects and minimize their negative effects.
We invite more scholarly investigation of this alternative approach and the ways in which it can be applied to various individual and organizational practices.