Essays on Emotion and Decision Making, with Implications for Policy

Abstract

Despite the remarkable growth of the field of emotion and decision-making in recent decades, our understanding of the potential effects of positive emotions and emotion regulation remains limited. This dissertation aims to advance our knowledge on these fronts. Drawing on and extending the insight that appraisals (i.e., patterns of interpretations) shape emotion experiences and are fruitful targets for regulating emotions, three essays elaborate on how emotions and their regulation influence judgment and decision-making in diverse domains. The first essay provides novel insights into the relationship between positive emotions and health decision-making, updating prior meta-analytic conclusions that positive emotions have no protective effects on appetitive risk behaviors. Drawing on and extending the Appraisal Tendency Framework, this essay proposes that gratitude, but not all positive emotions, could diminish decisions associated with cigarette smoking—a leading cause of preventable death globally. A series of multi-method studies provided evidence supporting this hypothesis (collective N = 34,222). Importantly, these findings reveal a missed opportunity in costly public health campaigns, which seldom evoke gratitude. By emphasizing gratitude’s potential role in mitigating appetitive risk behaviors, this work opens new avenues for intervention design in public health. While gratitude confers many benefits, the second essay offers a more nuanced understanding of the role of gratitude in moral decision-making. Building upon and expanding the Appraisal Tendency Framework, this essay introduces a phenomenon called gratitude-induced collusion, where gratitude could lead decision-makers to bend the rules to benefit others. Two financially incentivized experiments provided evidence supporting the hypothesis (collective N = 2,414). Gratitude increases collusion to benefit not only people who trigger the emotion (where reciprocity is present), but also unacquainted peers (where reciprocity is absent). These results update prior findings concluding that reciprocity has null effects on collusion and that gratitude intrinsically increases honesty. The findings prompt a deeper examination of gratitude's potential role in corruption and consideration of unintended consequences of positive emotion interventions. Finally, the third essay sheds new light on the role of emotion regulation in stressful work contexts. It hypothesizes that practicing reappraisal (a strategy involving altering one's appraisals about emotionally charged situations) could benefit emotional well-being and workplace outcomes among low-income workers, and a brief, low-cost, scalable reappraisal intervention could achieve durable effects. A survey and a longitudinal field experiment provided evidence supporting this hypothesis (collective N = 4,455). The findings deepen the discourse on boundary conditions, benefits, and costs associated with different emotion regulation strategies. By illuminating, for the first time, brief reappraisal intervention's long-lasting effects among low-income workers, this research underscores its potential to benefit diverse populations. Taken together, the present work enriches the understanding of the vital roles of emotion and emotion regulation in shaping decisions in health, moral, and organizational contexts. The findings hold significant policy implications for enhancing life expectancy, curbing dishonesty, and fostering workforce well-being.