The effects of emotion and motivation on attentional patterns in the decision-making process

Past research suggested that angry individuals tend to engage in heuristic decision making, whereas sad individuals are more likely to engage in systematic decision making. However, it is not clear in which stage of the decision-making process the different effects of anger and sadness emerge. The current study attempted to answer this question by directly examining individuals' attention toward different types of decision-relevant information (heuristic cues vs. factual information) while they worked on a number of decision-making tasks. The results suggested that the different effects of anger and sadness on decision making could be observed in the attentional process: angry individuals looked more and earlier toward heuristic cues, whereas sad individuals did not show such bias. The current study replicated previous findings that angry individuals reached decisions faster than sad ones; however, no difference was found between angry and sad individuals' actual choices. The second experiment showed that the different effects of anger and sadness on decision making could be explained by their different motivational styles as predicted by appraisal theory.;Another purpose of the current study was to explore age differences in decision making. We found that older adults showed attentional preference toward factual information in comparison with their younger counterparts. Further analysis revealed that this surprising finding could be explained by the higher levels of education achieved by older adults. The current study also replicated past findings that older adults reached their decisions slower. No age difference was found regarding young and older adults' actual choices.;The current study is important in that it provided an opportunity to directly examine how anger and sadness influence individuals' attention toward decision-relevant information during real-time decision-making tasks; this study also tested the underlying motivation of angry and sad decision makers. The results demonstrated that feeling anger triggers attentional preference toward heuristic cues; while feeling sad makes individuals look equally toward all types of information. This study supports the idea that gaze is an efficient tool that guides individuals toward information which could help them achieve their motivational goals.