The Impact Of Integrated Emotional Arousal On College Students' Experiential Decision-making Behavior And Psychological Processe

Each day we face a variety of decisions.In most decision-making scenarios,people cannot accurately predict the outcome of their choices,nor do they know the probabilities of various outcomes occurring,they can only use the experience gained from feedback to predict the subsequent selection results and make decisions.Such an activity is an experience-based decision-making.As an activity highly related to individual demands,decision-making can strongly arouse the emotion which is known as integral emotion.The integral emotion is different from those aroused before the decision and unrelated to the decision itself,because it is not a influencing factor in the decision-making process,but can directly help decision-makers understand the differences in the quality of various choices and guide them to make foresighted choices.On the contrary,individuals lacking such emotional responses tend to be myopically in decision-making.So,does this mean that the stronger the individual emotions aroused,the better the performance of experience-based decision-making? In order to answer the above questions,and clarify the role of integral emotion,this study takes the integral emotion arousal as an independent variable,explore the impact of integral emotion arousal on experience-based decision-making behavior and its internal psychological mechanism.This study consists of two experiments.Experiment 1 adopts a 2(arousal degree: high arousal,low arousal)× 5(blocks: 1,2,3,4,5)mixed experimental design.Sixty-one students from a university in Tianjin were randomly selected as subjects.Using the Iowa Gambling Task research paradigm and computational modeling research methods,the study examined whether and how integral emotional arousal affects college students’ performance in experience-based decision-making situations involving immediate reward and long-term reward conflicts.The results showed that the increase of the arousal increased the subjects’ choice of options with long-term reward,and reduced the sensitivity of reward and loss and the degree of choice consistency,and improved the learning rate.Based on the basic of Experiment 1,Experiment 2 randomly selected sixty-two students from a university in Tianjin as experimental subjects,and used the Soochow Gambling Task to examine whether and how integrative emotions affect college students’ performance in decision-making situations involving immediate loss and long-term reward conflicts.The results showed that at the behavioral level,the increase of integral emotion arousal increased the subjects’ choice of options with long-term reward,and reduced the degree of the sensitivity of reward and loss and the degree of choice consistency of the subjects,and significantly improved the learning rate.To sum up,the conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)Both in the experience-based decision-making situations involving immediate reward and long-term reward conflicts and in the situations involving immediate loss and long-term reward conflicts,the arousal of integral emotion has an influence on the behavior of experience-based decision-making.(2)The arousal of integral emotion has a broad influence on the psychological process during decision-making.The influence involves both the option evaluation process and the decision execution process.