Influence Of Emotional Stimulation On Decision-making Under Working Memory Load Evidenced From IGT

Whether in economics or psychology,decision making has always been widely concerned by researchers.From the perspective of normative theory,people's decision-making behavior is completely rational,and then the descriptive theory holds view that people's decision-making behavior is not completely rational,in addition,the guiding theory emphasizes how to make decisions under the constraints of their own cognition or emotion.Researchers have paid more and more attention to the relationship among emotion,cognition and decision making.Emotion is the product of human adaptation to the environment.It is a complex psychological activity involving a series of complex changes,including physiological awakening,experience,cognitive processes and behavioral responses.All the studies on the relationship between emotions and decision-making have proved that different emotions will produce different results on decision-making,for example,positive emotions and negative emotions lead to more risky behaviors.However,all the existing researches on emotions are carried out in the laboratory,and the decision-making environment of the subjects is relatively simple.However,people need to deal with a lot of information in real daily life,so it is difficult to make decisions in a relatively single environment.Therefore,it is worth studying whether the decision-making behavior of subjects under load conditions is still affected by emotions,and how to affect the decision-making behavior.In previous studies on cognitive load on decision making,although there have been studies that have proved that the higher the load level is,the more severely the decision-making ability of the subjects is impaired,there are inconsistent conclusions in the studies.One of the controversies is the result of the use of the working memory load paradigm.Therefore,in experiment 1,the classical working memory load task was used to study the influence of working memory load on decision making.The influence of load degree on decision making was discussed.On the basis of experiment 1,experiment 2 studied the influence of emotional stimulation on decision-making under high working memory load.On the one hand,it discussed whether the emotional stimulation would still have an impact under the condition of high working memory load;on the other hand,it discussed whether the emotional working memory load task had a dual impact on the decision-making behavior of the subjects.In this study,the classic IGT task was used to explore the decision-making behavior of the subjects.In this task,there were four kinds of cards including A,B,C and D,in which card A and card B were unfavorable cards and card C and card D were favorable cards.Results:1.Working memory load will affect decision making.The higher the load level is,the more severely the decision-making behavior of the subjects is impaired.Under the condition of high load,the subjects choose more and more cards B and D.Subjects are impaired in their ability to label unfavorable cards and show a risk-seeking tendency.However,the score of each block of the IGT task is gradually increasing with the progress of the task,showing a trend of linear discovery.2.Emotional stimulation has an impact on decision-making under high working memory load.Working memory load itself affects the subjects' ability to learn IGT tasks.There are differences among positive emotion group,negative emotion group and neutral emotion group,while there are no differences between negative emotion group and neutral emotion group.Under the condition of high working memory load,positive emotion makes individuals choose more cards B and D.However,compared with experiment one,the block score of the positive emotion group on the IGT task shows a declining trend.So subjects in the positive emotion group are affected by both working memory load and emotional stimulation,and their decision-making ability is impaired more severely.