The influence of emotions on cognitive processing, and the importance of retrospective evaluations
Abstract
The present thesis examines how emotions influence cognitive processing in
decision-making, and how people evaluate their emotions and cognitive
processing retrospectively. Emotions may determine whether intuitive or
analytical processing is utilized in a decision-making context. In addition, this
study takes on an explorative approach and discusses different theory regarding
heuristic biases that occur during self-reporting of both emotions and cognitive
processing. As a result of this, different time windows reflecting theory were
defined and applied to the data analysis. Further, emotions are explained in terms
of arousal and valence, thus physiological and self-reported arousal measures
were obtained from 153 subjects. In line with previous research, the self-reported
arousal data showed that emotionally induced arousal is predicted by a
summarized average, whereas self-reports of cognitive processing are subject to
primacy effects. The results also showed a significant influence of arousal on
analytical processing. In sum, our results provide an insight into how people
evaluate past experiences and strengthens existing research that emotions affect
cognitive processing, and thereby decision-making. Our findings and practical
implications, future research and limitations are also discussed.
Description
Masteroppgave(MSc) in Master of Science in Leadership and Organizational Psychology - Handelshøyskolen BI, 2017