On Friday, December 7, 2018, Mélody MAILLIEZ, PhD student in NCP - Cognitive Sciences, Psychology and Neurocognition at the Laboratory of Psychology and Neurocognition (LNPC), will submit her thesis "Interaction between incidental and integrated influences of emotions: role of cognitive evaluation of certainty".
The defense will take place at 2pm, in room 23119, at the UFR Lettres, Langues, Sciences Humaines (LLSH), on the Jacob-bellecombette campus.
Summary of the thesis
Developed in 2015,Emotion Imbued Choice (EIC; Lerner et al., 2015) explains how emotions influence decision-making. According to this model, incidental (non-decision-related) emotions associated with a high degree of certainty would trigger rather heuristic processing of information, while emotions associated with a high degree of uncertainty would trigger rather deliberative processing (Tiedens & Linton, 2001), explaining differences in performance in decision-making tasks. The influence of incidental emotions has been studied in both single decision making and sequential decision making (i.e., series of decisions). While the EIC provides a clear explanatory framework for single decision making, its predictions are less explicit for sequential decision making. The latter has the particularity that each decision is followed by feedback (gain or loss) with an emotional value (positive vs. negative). This integrated source of emotional influence (linked to the decision) can modify subsequent decisions. Authors have observed that triggering rather heuristic information processing leads participants to make more advantageous decisions than triggering rather deliberative information processing (Bagneux et al. 2013; see also Bollon & Bagneux, 2013). However, the involvement of processing the emotional value of feedback in obtaining this pattern of results has, to date, not received direct confirmation. Our aim was to identify how incidental emotions, depending on their degree of certainty, modulate sequential decision making. Through a series of seven experiments, we showed how these incidental emotions interact with the integrated emotional influence of feedback. Thus, only the triggering of a rather heuristic processing leads participants to modulate their decisions according to the type (positive vs. negative) of feedback received. These results concern tasks involving the sequential making of ambiguous and risky decisions. Modulation of the decision-making pattern was shown, classically, when negative incidental emotions were induced and, more originally, when positive incidental emotions were induced. Secondly, an analysis of the results and the literature highlighted the poor reliability of the degree of certainty measure. A series of six other studies, in line with the general methodology of scale construction, were carried out to investigate the origins of this problem. We showed that this low reliability was the dual consequence of an incomplete definition and imperfect operationalization of the certainty dimension. At a theoretical level, we propose that all our results support the need to extend the EIC model to sequential decision making. On a methodological level, our results justify the interest in developing a new tool for measuring the degree of certainty.