Title: Being Emotional during Decision
Making: Good or Bad? An Empirical Investigation
Author(s): Myeong-Gu Seo and Lisa Feldman
Barrett
Source: The Academy of Management Journal,
Vol. 50, No. 4 (Aug., 2007), pp. 923-940
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20159897
There is a debate of emotion within the
decision-making process. Some people
believe individual’s feelings will induce different biases into decision-making
process, which hurts the performance of decision-making process. In contrast,
other people argue that emotion can improve decision-making performance. As a
result, a large number of researches have been done towards this debate. One
interesting research conducted by Seo and Barrett in 2007 helps people to
understand the impacts of emotion on decision-making process deeper than it was
before. This study suggests that whether
being emotional is functional or dysfunctional in decision-making process
depends on the intensity when an individual experiences the emotion, named
affective reactivity, and the ability that person has to regulate the biases
induced by those emotions, defined as affective influence regulation, during
the decision-making process. Based on the data, the study concluded that
participants have higher degrees of affective influence regulation and
affective reactivity can make decision better than those with low affective
influence regulation and affective reactivity. In addition, the study also
finds out that a person’s ability to identify, distinguish, and describe
specific feeling know as emotion differentiation may also impacts people's
performance of decision-making process when they are emotional. This finding
directs the authors' future research.
