Abstract
The present study investigates how different emotions can alter social bargaining behavior. An important paradigm to study social bargaining is the Ultimatum Game. There, a proposer gets a pot of money and has to offer part of it to a responder. If the responder accepts, both players get the money as proposed by the proposer. If he rejects, none of the players gets anything. Rational choice models would predict that responders accept all offers above 0. However, evidence shows that responders typically reject a large proportion of all unfair offers. We analyzed participants’ behavior when they played the Ultimatum Game as responders and simultaneously collected electroencephalogram data in order to quantify the feedback-related negativity and P3b components. We induced state affect (momentarily emotions unrelated to the task) via short movie clips and measured trait affect (longer-lasting emotional dispositions) via questionnaires. State happiness led to increased acceptance rates of very unfair offers. Regarding neurophysiology, we found that unfair offers elicited larger feedback-related negativity amplitudes than fair offers. Additionally, an interaction of state and trait affect occurred: high trait negative affect (subsuming a variety of aversive mood states) led to increased feedback-related negativity amplitudes when participants were in an angry mood, but not if they currently experienced fear or happiness. We discuss that increased rumination might be responsible for this result, which might not occur, however, when people experience happiness or fear. Apart from that, we found that fair offers elicited larger P3b components than unfair offers, which might reflect increased pleasure in response to fair offers. Moreover, high trait negative affect was associated with decreased P3b amplitudes, potentially reflecting decreased motivation to engage in activities. We discuss implications of our results in the light of theories and research on depression and anxiety.
Highlights
Social bargaining is important in our daily lives because we are reliant on receiving goods and services from others [1]
We found that unfair offers elicited larger feedback-related negativity amplitudes than fair offers
The present study investigated the influences of state and trait affect on social bargaining behavior and underlying neural correlates
Summary
Social bargaining is important in our daily lives because we are reliant on receiving goods and services from others [1]. Previous studies suggest that state affect (i.e., momentarily emotions unrelated to the task itself) and trait affect (i.e., longer lasting affect) influence decisions in the Ultimatum Game, especially when responders receive unfair offers. Harlé and Sanfey [14], though, suggest that not the valence of emotions (i.e., positive vs negative emotions) influence decisions in the Ultimatum Game, but rather their motivational direction They found that approach-motivated state emotions (promoting engagement with offending stimuli; in their study amusement and anger) led to higher acceptance rates of unfair offers than withdrawal-motivated emotions (serenity and disgust). Several studies have shown that unfair Ultimatum Game offers elicit larger FRN amplitudes compared to fair offers, probably because they represent more negative feedback on what the proposer is willing to offer to the responder [13, 22,23,24,25,26]. The experience of different state and trait emotions might alter motivational processing, resulting in changes in the P3b component
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