Effects of approach and withdrawal motivation on risk decision making

Abstract

Objective To explore the role of emotional valence and motivational direction avoidance on risk taking behavior. Methods In the experiment, 300 healthy young adults were randomly assigned to a control and four emotion condition groups(60 per group), which induced by four short movie clips of 100~140 seconds' duration. To keep participants from suspecting a link between the emotional induction and the Iowa gambling task(IGT), participants were told that they would complete two experiments. The first experiment was to evaluate whether the movie clips were suitable for materials of the memory test, and the second was to complete a poke gambling task, and then they were required to read the instructions about the IGT. Immediately after reading the instructions and watching one of four movie clips and completing the scales of emotional appraisals, participants were asked to perform the IGT. At the end of the procedure, the experimenter asked the participants for their opinion about the experiments. They all answered that the two experiments were independent of each other. Results With approach-based emotion (amusement and anger) prompting more advantageous card selection along with the time course of the decision making relative to withdrawal-based emotion (serenity and disgust) (0.75±0.01 vs 0.67±0.01). Furthermore, compared with the latter(block 1-5: -5.85±0.66 vs -1.36±0.62 vs 2.78±0.57 vs 1.93±0.52 vs 2.90±0.61), the participants with approach-based emotion(block1-5: -6.28±0.66 vs -1.67±0.63 vs 7.63±0.57 vs 6.43±0.52 vs 8.03±0.61) preferred to transform the direction of card selection after getting negative feedback to avoid potentially high risks. Additionally, the main effect of the motivation direction mentioned above was more and more significant along with the increase of the intensity of the emotion. Conclusion A main effect of motivational direction, but not valence is observed in the present study, the results suggest that motivation dimension, relative to emotional valence, may be a more useful research perspective to study such decisions. Key words: Risk taking and decision making; Iowa gambling task; Emotion; Motivation