The Influence Of Negative Emotions On Inter-temporal Decision

Inter-temporal decision is the result of an individual's choice of profit and loss occurring at different position.Inter-temporal decision is universal and closely related to everyone,not only related to personal health and wealth,but also to the prosperity of a nation.Inter-temporal decision results have more influencing factors,such as gender,age,framework effect,psychological distance and emotions.In the past,the research on emotions and decision mainly has two research paradigms:emotional valence and emotional cognitive appraisal tendency framework.The emotional valence research paradigm divides emotions into positive and negative.The interpretation of the decision results is that positive emotions tend to be more positive judgments,while negative emotions tend to be negative judgments.Relevant decision theories such as mood maintenance,affect heuristic and affect-as-information;the research paradigm of emotional cognition appraisal tends to generate the same cognitive evaluation tendency according to the core evaluation theme of emotion,and the individual under the deterministic and controllable theme emotion tends to delay satisfaction.At present,more studies are based on the theoretical interpretation of emotional appraisal tendencies framework but lack the empirical and analysis of the time discount rate in inter-temporal decision.Therefore,this study is based on the evaluation tendency framework to design two experiments to explore the influence of negative emotions on inter-temporal decision.To explore the influence of emotions to inter-temporal,Experiment 1 used a completely randomized experimental design of 3(emotional types: pleasure,anger and sadness)× 2(gender:boys and girls),with a delay option ratio and a time discount rate as a dependent variable.The results showed that:(1)gender had no significant effect on delay option ratio and time discount rate;(2)joy group and anger group had no significant effect on delay option ratio and time discount rate,but compared with the sad group,the joy group and the angry group had higher delay options and the lower time discount rate.Experiment 2 aims to further explore the relationship between emotion,psychological distance and inter-temporal decision.The results showed that:(1)males had higher delay option ratio and lower time discount rate than females;anger group and sad group did not havesignificant difference in delay option ratio and time discount rate;(2)psychological distance acts as a mediator between anger and time discount rates.In view of the inconsistency between the results of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2,the researcher conducted a comprehensive analysis of the results of the two experiments by means of mini-meta analysis.The results showed that:(1)the angry group had a higher delay option than the sad group,and had lower Time discount rate;(2)gender,age have no significant effect on delay option ratio and time discount rate.Based on the results of comprehensive experiment 1 and experiment 2 and mini-meta analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)The negative emotions of different cognitive appraisal tendency frameworks have different effects on the results of inter-temporal decision;(2)psychological distance in anger has a full mediation effect with the time discount rate.The inspiration of this research is that people should avoid making decision and judgments about money in the mood of sadness,as opposed to the anger of the same negative emotions but different core appraisal theme.