The Development Of The Effect Of Immediate Emotions On Social Decision Making

Emotions have important social functions. Emotional processes have definite effect on interpersonal interaction. Although social decisions have much in common with individual decisions as they both driven by material reward or punishment, social decisions do differ in some important way. The role and function of emotions in social decision making has inspired a wave of research in a variety of disciplines.The study was designed to investigate the development of the effect of immediate emotion on decision-making in the context of social interactions and psychological mechanism of emotion-cognition interaction by methods of psycho-physiological experiments. Ultimatum game was used as basic research paradigm. Three studies comprising four experiments were carried out.In study 1, the age-related change of the effect of immediate emotions on social decision in UG was detected. This study included two experiments. In Experiment 1, students form three different grades were selected as the responders in UG and autonomic nerve arousal was monitored to probe the emotion arousal level. In Experiment 2, the effect of the appearance of the proposers on the acceptance rate of unfair offers was explored.In study 2, participants were assigned to different emotion state and fairness cognition to examine the interplay of emotion and cognition on social decision making.In study 3, emotion suppression was manipulated to examine the psychological mechanism underlying the depletion of self regulatory capacity in social decision making.The main results showed as follows.(1) Participants'acceptance rate decreased as the offers became less fair in the UG and younger children accepted smaller offers than older participants.(2) Higher skin conductance response for unfair offers suggested that unfair offers elicit more emotional arousal. There was significant effect of grade in emotional arousal evoked by the offer. University students were more sensitive to the fairness level.(3) Skin conductance activity was significantly greater in response to unfair offers that were later rejected in university group. There was no significant difference of the autonomic nervous arousal before making accept and refuse choice in children.(4) Gender pairing of the partners in the UG systematically affects behavior of adult. Men were easier to accept unfair offers when the bargaining partners have the different gender than when they have the same gender, while the behavior of women was not affected by the partners' gender.(5) Physical appearance of proposer interacted with responder's gender on the UG decisions made by students form 3 and 5 grades. The unfair offers from physically-attractive proposers were accepted more by girl. The acceptation rates had no significant difference between girls and boys when facing with physical unattractive proposers. Physical appearance of proposer had no significant influence on the decision made by boys. Girls were more inclined to accept unfair offers by physically-attractive proposers.(6) Emotion interacted with the fairness judgment on the UG decisions. In sad emotions, the higher fairness judgment participants were more likely to refuse the unfair offers. In happy emotions, there were no significant difference between higher and lower fair judgment participants. Induced sadness was resulted in lower acceptance rates of unfair offers under the higher fair judgment condition. Emotions had no impact on the decision under lower fair judgment participants.(7) Emotion suppression had significant influence on the UG decisions. When facing with the most unfair offers, participants in emotion suppression condition were more likely to make refuse decisions.In summary, the acceptance rates of responders in UG were influenced by the arousal level and suppression of immediate emotions. Social decision making process may consume self regulatory resource; both emotions and cognition exert an effect on this process.