Keep Silent Or Not —The Role Of Emotion Expression In Social Decision-making

Individuals make decisions not only based on their own emotions, but also affected by others’ emotions. This is so called “interpersonal effects” of sentiment. Thus, recently, increasing studies focus on emotion’s social functions. On this foundation, affect infusion model, risk perception and assessment dual system, emotion as social information model and neural affective decision theory are blossom.This study aims to verify EASI model, take the ultimatum game as paradigm to discuss the “intrapersonal effects” and “interpersonal effects” in social decision-making. In addition, we test the differences between text messages and voice messages. In study 1, the main purpose is on the express functions, which means the influence of individuals’ own emotions. Then, study 2 pays the attention on emotion’s intrapersonal effects. As for study 3, it tries to find the “interpersonal effects” of emotion in the ultimatum game from the proposer’s aspects. The results suggest, for the proposers, the behavior-oriented anger which contains more social information could affect the proposers to adjust the origins proposal towards a prosocial orientation compared with the person-oriented anger. As for the responders, after emotion expression together with a feedback, they likely to think rationally, that leads them trend to accept the unfair proposals which reflects the rational side of decision-making. According to the three studies, the findings are as follows:(1) Only with the feedback of emotion expression, then, it has the equivalence with refusal;(2) Emotion orientation could affect the evaluation of the other’s limits;(3) Emotion expression has a significant “interpersonal effects”, besides, behavior-oriented emotions work better than person-oriented.