Question

QUESTION 1- An executive experiences indecision after brain surgery, even though his intellect is intact, but his emotions have changed. What role do emotions play in decision making?

Answer 1

Role of emotion in decision making, Various research has been conducted on the impacts of emotion on decision-making. Studies indicate the complexity and breadth of those impacts.
His behavior had changed due to brain surgery, his intellect is intact, but its lead to change his behavior, somehow his emotions was changed.
Decision-makers who were made to consider safety concerns that induced negative emotions.
Study participants who experienced "frustrated anger" were more likely to choose a high risk,
"Fearful people made pessimistic judgments of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgements."
Study participants who had been induced to feel sad were likely to set a lower selling price for an item they were asked to sell; the researchers suggest that selling the item would bring about a change in the participants’ circumstances and thus perhaps a positive change in emotion.
Participants with "normal emotion processing" were engaged in a routine task. While doing this he consequently experiencing losses and the associated negative emotions, they subsequently made safer and more lucrative choices. Participants with brain damage that had left them unable to experience such emotional responses, did not change their behavior in this way.
Another important factor is the memory of events in decision making. The state of mind of someone has works as "a retrieval cue" whereby happy feelings make positive materials come to mind which in turn have great impact on the decisions that are made. The same is true of negative feelings.
Emotions and feelings cannot be extracted from the human mind. The emotions felt in a particular situation will be recorded in the emotional memory and can be activated when the person faces a similar situation or has to make a difficult decision in a short period of time. Often the decision maker is unaware of previous experiences in similar situations.
Thus emotions cannot simply be classified as positive or negative as we need to consider the consequences of the emotions in ultimate decision-making.
Though there are a lot of expressions of emotions, we can broadly divide them into two types: positive and negative. Positive emotions are love, care, understanding, friendship, happiness, satisfaction, etc., whereas negative emotions comprise anger, hate, envy, greed, frustration, etc. We think with the help of our brain, but most of the time we listen to our heart. Some people are more emotional than others and hence, their decisions are most of the time biased. Emotions influence our decisions, understand and emotionally, support us. These emotions are responsible for many of our important decisions for which later on, we may feel regretful or consider them most cherished ones depending on the outcome. But the fact is that they do affect our decision.