The difficulty of predicting risky decisions : - An experiment investigating present and future affective states influence on risk-taking

Affect and feelings states influences decision-making and risk-taking, however is it not clear yet how. This report presents a between-subject experiment on the two mechanisms, affective evaluation and affect regulation, and on how risk-taking redirects depending on which of the two is active. Incidental affect (positive, negative or neutral) was induced by pictures in an online experiment with 999 participants, who conducted the Columbia Card Task (CCT) to measure the risk-taking. The participants were informed prior to the task that gambling either makes people happy (mood-lifting cue), sad (mood-threatening cue) or has no effect on people’s mood (mood-freezing cue). The predicted results in this experiment was not found. However, the results indicate that mood changing qualities of a task can be manipulated and that further research about the interaction between incidental and integral affect is needed. The results also displayed how fleeting induced affect can be and consciousness about what affect is used is discussed