How does emotion acted as disruption in decision-making process

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.