The Impact Of Joy-Sadness On Risk Taking: The Moderating Effect Of Emotion Understanding Ability

After a review of previous researches, it is not difficult to find that emotion plays a very important role in decision making. With the increasing researches of decision making area, we achieved growing number research productions of the relationship between individual differences and risk taking and it cannot be ignored that different individuals present certain differences when dealing with emotion. Numerous researches have proved that there are individual differences in emotional intelligence since Mayer and Salovey proposed emotional intelligence(Mayer & Salovey,1997;Salovey & Mayer,1990). Along with their idea, this research introduced emotion understanding ability as variable, tending to discuss the impact of emotion understanding ability and emotion to risk taking.This research consisted of three parts.The first part studied the impact of joy-sadness on risk taking, introducing the factor of gender, tending to combine mood-congruent effect with differences in the emotional intensity to explain gender differences in risk taking, the results showed that :(1) The mood-congruent effect exists in risk taking: the subjects in positive emotions are likely to select risky options, while in negative emotions tend to be more conservative;(2) The gender differences in risk taking are significant: the male tends to risky behavior while the female prefers to avoid risks;(3) There are no significant differences when the male and the female both are delighted, while when they are in sad, the female’s emotional intensity exceeds the male.Based on the first part, the second part studied the impact of emotion-understanding ability between joy-sadness emotion and risk taking, the research showed that: interaction between emotion and emotion-understanding ability are significant, and emotion-understanding ability is moderating variable between emotion and risk taking.The third part studied the impact of consciousness to the emotion and emotion-understanding ability when making risky decision, the research showed that:consciousness determines whether emotion-understanding ability has moderating effect between emotion and risk taking:(1) under unconscious condition, there is a significant interaction between emotion and emotion understanding ability, andmoderating effect exists between emotion and risk taking;(2) under conscious condition, the interaction between emotion and emotion understanding ability is not significant, and moderating effect does not exist between emotion and risk taking.