Emotions Affect The Decision-making Process And Outcome Evaluation The Cognitive Neuroscience Mechanism

Decision-making behaviors can always be observed in individual's daily life. Economic decision-making which related to money gain or loss especially has great influence on people's survival and development in modern society. Therefore, economic decision-making always became research focus to economists, sociologists and psychologists. By brain imaging technologies, not just the behavioral study of decision-making behavior, but also their deep brain dynamic neural mechanisms were explored. Decision-making processes include rapid assessment of decision-making's environment and opponents'cognition, etc; outcome evalutation refers to assessment of people's own decision-making behavior and feedbacks from external enviorment. There are both helpful to decision-making, so it is very important to explore the cognitive neuroscience mechanisms of decision-making processes. Some initial studies always used simple experimental paradigms to get general applicable findings. Therefore, existed domestic and international researches ignored real social conditions. With the developmental and increasing ecological validity's requirements of research, these series of studies focused on different emotions, social interaction, and some social contexts, combied with high time resolution event-related brain imaging techniques (ERP), tried to build real social context in laboratory, in order to improve the ecological validity of research results.In study1, we considered positive and negative emotions, fairness and unfairness in social situations, interpersonal decision-making process. The study directly investigated differential influence from positive and negative emotions in ultimatum game (UG). Also the study considered personality, to explore the relationship between different personalitiese and and decision-making behavior. We found th at compared to negative emotions and fair offers, larger medial frontal negativity (MFN) amplitudes were found in positive emotions and unf air offers; in negative emotions and unfair offers, conscientiousness and the amplitude of MFN had a positive rela tionship, related to positive emotions and fair offers. The results reveal that the MFN reflected the cognitive evaluate process of decision-making situations and positive emotions benefited the cognition of different situations; conscientiousness enhanced the economic incomes by weakening the MFN in negative emotions and unfair situation.Because of the particularity of UG (subjects in cognitive decision-making stage can get their choice of right or wrong), so the money gains and losses feedback in the UG can only be regarded as relatively weaker feedback. In study2, we also considered positive and negative emotions, fairness and unfairness in social situations, and social interaction in outcome evaluation. Therefore, this is a different study which attempted to examine the feedback stimulation of outcome evaluation phase whether would be influenced by positive and negative emotions, and, different emotions how to affect the outcome phase. Results showed: both positive and negative emotions induced a significant feedback-related negivity (FRN) in the feefdback phase; compared with positive emotions, negative emotions induced bigger FRN difference wave. These indicated that positive and negative emotions impact the weaker feedback of UG; and negative emotions have more serious influence on outcome evaluation.In study3, we considered different types of immediate emotions, social situations and interpersonal fairness. This study explored a special emotion-disgust, which related to aversion of equity preference (unfairese also has a "social aversion") decision-making process as fair/unfair situations in the UG. Results showed that relative to neutral mood, digust brought larger FRN difference waveform. As disgust is strongly related to social aversion, this result indicated disgust promoted awareness of the decision-making processing in unfair situations.In study4, research results can be applied to clinical psychology. This study focused on sadness, to study the influence of sadness on economic decision-making. Analysis found, relative to neutral mood, sadness brought a smaller FRN difference waveform in outcome evaluation (money win or lose). The result of this study was not similar to the result of study2, indicated compared to neutral and positive emotions, negative emotions' impact on decision-making have to depend on different social contexts.Take all above four studies together, we can found, when we explore the impact of social situations to decision-making process and outcome evaluation, we should consider confused social contexts (fair or unfair, social interaction), different decision-making stages (congnitive stage, outcome evaluation), and special emotions. In all, it is complex to examine the relationship between social situations and decision-making, take special emotions and real social situations into the research of decision-making are also the future of that kind study. However, these serials studies used ERP technique, not only explored the cognitive neural mechanisms of decision-making, but also used some kind of social contexts, improved the ecological validity of these studies, made these results can be used in real life.