An Event-related Potentials Study Of Mood Affect Risk Decision-making

How mood has effect on risk decision-making is a popular topic in decision-making field.Former studies suggested that positive mood will make people to take risk duringdecision-making and on the contrary negative mood will make people avoid risk duringdecision-making. It’s called affective generalization hypothesis. Another theory suggested justthe opposite viewpoint: positive mood lead people to avoid risk and negative mood make peopleto take risk. They think people in good mood would like to maintain their good feeling so as toavoid any risk. Similarly people in bad mood would like to take high risk to gain some profitsand change their bad feelings. It’s called mood maintenance hypothesis.Basing on these two hypothesis the studies of decision-making in behavioral form has gotso much advance but the electrical physiological performance of this field is relatively rare.Firstly, how many periods does our brain process decision-making under specific mood wouldexperience and what’s the time schedule of processing course? What’s the neural basis ofemotion effect decision-making? For solving these questions this study adopt gambling game tosimulate decision-making situation, aiming to explore the neural basis of decision-making duringspecific mood under risk. This study include three experiments to learn this question.we have explored the neural basis of how mood affect the process of risk decision-making.Prior researches talked about the process of emotion affect decision-making just based onsimulated situation. This paper adopt the method of Event-related Potentials (ERP) in labscenario to search the neural basis of two kinds of mood which have different valence: happy andangry influence the decision-making process under risk. Results:(1) Behavioral experimentsshows that happy mood will make people to think optimistic and promote them to take risk indecision-making. On the other hand, angry mood also make people to take risk indecision-making. This result is not same with happy mood because angry is a kind of emotionthat can promote people act radical and reduce risk perception. It is consistent with formerstudies.(2) ERP experiments shows: Firstly, angry mood induces larger amplitude of N200thanhappy mood which means people should take more cognitive control in angry emotion to make a decision under risk. Secondly, people make decision in angry mood have induced larger P300amplitude which means that the decision made by people in angry mood would include muchmore emotion. So decision in angry mood is hard to control. Thirdly, the latency of N200andP300in two kinds of mood has not showed remarkable differences. It’s probably means thatwhen we in mood situation our brain would process decision information with the sameprocedure and speed. All above results make clear the neural basis of risk decision-making fromthe deep.