The effect of emotion and time pressure on risk decision-making

Emotion and time pressure are two important factors affecting risk decision-making. This study explored the interaction of emotion and time pressure on risk decision-making by adopting 3 (emotion state: positive emotion, negative emotion, and control group) x 2 (time constraint: high time constraint and no time constraint) between-subject experiment design. The results showed that (1) both emotion and time pressure exerted significant effect on risk decision-making (generally, positive emotion renders participants more risk prone than negative emotion, and high time pressure promotes people more risk seeking than no time pressure); (2) time pressure polarized the effects of different emotions on risk decision-making. As effects of emotions were polarized under high time pressure, two distinct cognitive pathways may function in human decision-making. Based on our experimental result and previous neuroeconomic works, we proposed a novel dual cognitive pathways model to explain phenomenon in the current article.