The Influence Of Psychological Distance And Emotion Regulation On Decision-making

Emotion has played a more and more important role in decision making of daily life. Researchers nowadays are wild about studying how to regulate emotion to affect people’s decision. Cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression are the two most wildly studied emotion regulations at present. These two regulations are quite different from each other, and can cause different decisions as well. Cognitive reappraisal is a way to change our understanding of emotional events, change the meaning of events. Expressive depression would restrain emotion deliberately after emotion was triggered, so as not to be detected by others.Studies gradually focus on framing effect that caused by emotion regulation on decision-making. Prospect theory proposed by Kahneman (2003) hold the opinion that choices of different linguistic organizations are subjectively consistent to each other, it influences emotion by change the reference point (results be framed by gains or losses). The change in framing influences subjectively evaluation, and then regulate people’s risk tendency.Construal level theory holds that people’s reactions to events depend on their psychological characterizations to these events. People’s psychological characterizations have different levels of distraction (Construal level), and construal level depends on psychological distance which people feel and cognize, so as to affect judgments and decision-making.This study researches framing effect in disease domain, in order to understand the effectiveness of emotion regulation in different domains and people’s risk tendency in different decisions.This study focuses on the question whether emotion regulation and psychological distance would influence decision-making in disease domain. Results show that emotion regulation has no significant impact on decision-making in disease domain, while psychological distance significantly influences decision-making in disease domain:subjects of far psychological distance are more risky than that of low psychological distance; framing effect is significant:subjects in positive framing tend to risk aversion, while subjects in negative framing tend to take risk; after framing decision, negative emotions decrease, while positive emotions make no significant difference.