Influência das emoções, tristezas e nojo na tomada de decisão económica com risco

: estudo experimental a associações com sintomas psicopatológicos

Abstract

Constantly individuals make decisions without, in most of the times, having intentionality in the process of decision. Additionally, the decision making often suffer from different types of influence, such as emotional influence. Specialized literature suggests that during a task, a simple emotional induction can change the making-decision process. In the last decades two different types of knowledge have been converging and proposing explanatory models that correlate the economic decision-making under emotional influence. The economy contributes with explanation models of the economic decision-making under risk and psychology advances with theoretic models about the emotional influence in the process. The emotions studied in this study were Disgust and Sadness. Disgust is considered one of the most influential emotions in the consumer cultures since actions can be of some influence in the economic choices. The sadness, sharing the same valence as disgust, may be associated in many cases to the presence of psychopathology. The general purpose of this study is to test if university students are more or less averse to risk after emotional induction of Disgust and Sadness. In this sense, the present study included 150 participants divided into 3 experimental conditions: (I) Neutral (II) Disgust and (III) Sadness. They all answered to a survey about tasks of economic decisions in scenarios involving gains or losses. In general, and contrary to the hypotheses, and what is claimed in specialized literature, there were no significant differences between the emotional decisions and the process of economic decision-making although with significant variation changes related to age and gender, and also with some psychopathological domains, suggesting new lines of research.

Date of Award	8 Jul 2013
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Pedro Dias (Supervisor) & Fernando Ferreira-Santos (Supervisor)