On Friday, December 7, 2018, Mélody MAILLIEZ, PhD student in PCN – Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, and Neurocognition at the Laboratory of Psychology and Neurocognition (LNPC), will defend her thesis entitled "Interaction between incidental and integrated influences of emotions: the role of cognitive certainty assessment."
The defense will take place at 2 p. m. in room 23119, at the Faculty of Arts, Languages, and Humanities (LLSH), on the Jacob-Bellecombette campus.
Thesis summary
Developed in 2015,Emotion Imbued Choice (EIC; Lerner et al., 2015) explains how emotions influence decision-making. According to this model, incidental emotions (unrelated to the decision) associated with a high degree of certainty trigger a more heuristic processing of information, while emotions associated with a high degree of uncertainty trigger a more deliberative processing (Tiedens & Linton, 2001), explaining differences in performance in decision-making tasks. The influence of incidental emotions has been studied in single decision-making and sequential decision-making (i.e., series of decisions). While the EIC provides a clear explanatory framework for single decisions, its predictions are less explicit when it comes to 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 source of integrated emotional influence (related to the decision) can modify subsequent decisions. Authors have observed that triggering a more heuristic information processing leads participants to make more advantageous decisions than triggering a more 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 not yet been directly confirmed. Our objective 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 sequential decision-making tasks that are ambiguous and risky. The modulation of the decision-making pattern was demonstrated, in a classic manner, during the induction of negative incidental emotions and, more originally, during the induction of positive incidental emotions. Secondly, analysis of the results and the literature highlighted the poor reliability of the measurement of the degree of certainty. A series of six other studies, following the general methodology of scale construction, was conducted 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. On a theoretical level, we propose that all of our results support the need to extend the EIC model to sequential decision-making. Methodologically, our results justify the development of a new tool for measuring certainty.