- Email: [email protected]
Emotions, Decisions, and the Brain
JOURNAL OF CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY, 17(3), 174-178 Copyright 0 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Emotions, Decisions, and the Brain Baba Shiv Stanford Graduate School of Business
This article presents a commentary on the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (ATF) developed by Lerner and her colleagues. The article explores ways by which the ATF can be extended including (a) incorporating elements from other frameworks, (b) incorporating the role of arousal, (c) exploring individual-differencefactors, and (d) examining the neural correlates of some of the key elements of the ATF. The article concludes with a discussion of the promise that decision neuroscience offers to further enrich an already exciting and thriving area of research in emotion and decision making. The history of mankind is the history of ideas. (Ludwig von
Mises, as cited in Planned Chaos, 1947) The main thing is to make history, not write it. (Otto Von
Bismark, as cited in quotationsbook.com) Thomas Kuhn stated in his now-famous book, The Structure of Scientifc Revolutions (1962), that the progress of science is punctuated by paradigm shifts brought about by revolutionary ideas that significantly alter our conceptual worldview. The Appraisal-Tendency Framework (ATF) proposed and developed by Lerner and her colleagues (e.g., Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007) clearly fits with Kuhn's notion of paradigm shifts. As highlighted by Han, Lerner, and Keltner (2007), the conceptual worldview in mood literature had revolved around a valence-based approach, with the focus being on unraveling the effects of positive and negative moods on judgment and decision making. The ATF dramatically changed this worldview by demonstrating, for instance, that two mood states such as fear and anger, although both negative, can yield very different judgmental effects (Lerner & Keltner, 2001). Following this paradigm shift, the study of mood has now become richer and more nuanced, and some of the conflicting findings in the literature have begun to make sense when viewed through the lens of the ATF. Even more dramatic has been the ability to make unique and counterintuitive predictions. Consider, for example, the endowment effect, which has often been views as one of the most robust phenomena in the decision-making literature (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1991). A study grounded in the ATF
Correspondence should be addressed to Baba Shiv, Stanford Graduate School of Business, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305. E-mail: [email protected]
predicted and showed that this phenomenon may not be robust after all-that disgust can eliminate the effect and sadness can actually give rise to a "reverse endowment effect" (Lerner, Small, & Loewenstein, 2004). One could have not even contemplated making such predictions without the ATF. As noted in the second opening quote, my goal for the rest of this commentary is to not be a mere writer of history but to provide the spark for shaping what is to come in the literature on emotion and decision making. To accomplish this goal, I present my commentary in two broad sections. In the first section, I highlight how the ATF can be further strengthened by (a) incorporating elements from other powerful frameworks that have been recently proposed in the mood literature (e.g., Andrade, 2005; Andrade & Cohen, in press); (b) examining the role of arousal, which used to be central to the literature on emotion for a major part of the 20th century but now seems to have taken a backstage role; (c) exploring individual difference factors; and (d) identifying neural correlates to some of the key elements of the ATF. In the second, section, I broaden my focus and highlight the promise that decision neuroscience offers to further enrich the study of emotion and decision making.
EXTENDING THE ATF The ATF and the Affect-based Evaluation and Regulation Framework As with the ATF, another framework that has caught the attention of researchers working on emotion is the Affectbased Evaluation and Regulation (AER> framework developed by Andrade and his colleagues (Andrade, 2005; Andrade & Cohen, in press). In contrast to the ATF, which
EMOTIONS, DECISIONS, AND THE BRAIN
provides a more nuanced appraisal-based approach to examining mood effects, the AER provides a simple but powerful to accommodating divergent streams of mood under one overarching theoretical umbrella. Apart from providing a unifying framework, a major contribution of the AER to the mood literature is in its ability, as with the ATF, to provide a handle for resolving seemingly conflicting findings in the literature. As a starting point, the AER broadly categorizes research on mood into those related to affective evaluation and those related to affect regulation. In the former category of the impact of affect on behavior is construed as arising through a cognitive mediator, with affect influencing cognitions that are brought to bear in the decision in either a direct manner by providing unique information or a more indirect manner by enhancing the accessibility of moodcongruent cognitions. Thus, from a cognitive mediation standpoint, positive affect has a propensity to generate more favorable evaluations of the environment that, in turn, results in proactive action tendencies. In contrast, negative affect has a propensity to generate less favorable evaluations, resulting in inhibitory action tendencies. In the latter category of research, the impact of affect on behavior arises through a motivational mediator, wherein the discrepancy between the affect being currently experienced and that could be experienced in the future as a result of a behavior serves as a motivator to guide behavior. Thus, from a motivation-mediation standpoint, the action tendencies will be the exact reverse of what occurs in the cognitive-mediation category. Specifically, people experiencing positive affect will exhibit inhibitory action tendencies for fear that such actions will threaten the favorable current affective experience. In contrast, people experiencing negative affect will exhibit proactive action tendencies in anticipation of the mood-lifting consequences of such actions. The AER then views the affect-behavior relation as being determined by which of the two parallel mediators have a bigger impact on the behavioral response and, thus, gives a very good handle for clarifying seeming inconsistencies in the mood literature. For example, positive mood has been shown to sometimes increase the propensity to help (Isen & Levin, 1972); sometimes decrease it (Isen & Simmonds, 1978). The AER can account for these discrepant findings by positing that positive mood will increase the propensity to help if the cognitive mediator (i.e., the biasing effects of positive mood on evaluations of helping) has a bigger impact than the motivational mediator. Positive mood will decrease the propensity to help if the situational cues lead individuals to anticipate negative affect if the behavior were enacted and if the motivation to avoid this negative affect (the motivational mediator) has a bigger impact than the cognitive mediator. Some of the core aspects of the AER can easily be brought to bear to enrich and extend the ATF. For instance, one could potentially think of refining the box, "content and
175
depth of thought" in Figure 1 of Kan et al. (2007) by breaking it down further into cognitive versus motivational mediators. Thus, sadness, which yields action tendencies that are aimed at changing the present circumstances (Lerner et al., 2004), could perhaps be construed as an effect that arises more through the motivational route rather than a cognitive route. On the other hand, when sadness shapes perceptions of ambiguous negative events by causing individuals to attribute to the event to situational factors, the resulting effect could perhaps be construed has having arisen more through the cognitive route. Having refined the ATF in this manner, the next step would be to identify task as well as context-related factors that would "swing" the same appraisal tendencies onto either the cognitive route or the motivational route. The AER can serve to refine the ATF in yet another way. As Han et al. (2007) point out, there are a variety of ways in which the affect-behavior link could arise, and that the appraisal tendency route is only one such way. The ATF can be refined and extended by spelling out under what situations is this link likely to be mediated by appraisal tendencies and under what situations is it likely to be mediated by nonappraisal-related factors. Currently, the ATF does not consider the possibility that the same emotion can sometimes be mediated by appraisal tendencies and sometimes by affect regulation. For instance, it does not consider the possibility that at times anxious (vs. sad) people may refrain from taking risks based on the appraisal tendencies that become salient in this state, whereas at other times such people may refrain from doing so based on an affective forecast that taking risks could end up making them feel worse (the source of affect regulation).
Incorporating Arousal Into the ATF The study of emotion has invoked the critical role of arousal, the physiological correlate of emotion. In his book, Principles of Psychology ( 1 890, 1952), William James went to the extent of stating that without the arousal component there can be no emotion-a view that is shared by many to this day (e.g., Bechara, Damasio, & Damasio, 2000; Damasio, 2000). Yet, the ATF does not explicitly invoke the role of arousal in the effects of mood on judgment and behavior. Rather than see this aspect as a weakness, I view it as a tremendous opportunity for refining and extending the framework. The question is, what roles might arousal play in the ATF? My surmise is that arousal could impact the ATF at various levels. First, the level of arousal could alter the likelihood that a particular set of appraisal themes and dimensions will be activated, determine the accessibility of these appraisal themes and dimensions, and thus determine the strength of the affect-decision link. Take, for instance, anger, which is characterized by appraisals of individual control. Some individuals may experience anger with greater arousal than
others due to individual-difference factors (Davidson, 1998) or due to the transfer of affect from a previous task (Zillmann, 1971). The enhanced arousal in some of these individuals could result in the appraisal of individual control being more accessible and, thus, result in stronger downstream effects on judgment and decision making. Second, arousal could affect the metacognitive confidence related to the appraisal themes and dimensions and, thus, influence the strength of the affect-decision link. (See Andrade, 2005, for a discussion on the role of accessibility and diagnosticity in moderating the affect-decision link.) Third, arousal has been known to provide the "mobilizing force or energy" for action tendencies that are recruited by emotion (Davidson, Jackson, & Kalin, 2000). Thus, arousal could affect the strength of the relevant goals that are activated by the appraisal tendencies in response to the emotion in question. For instance, anger accompanied by higher levels of arousal could not only result in greater likelihood of attributions of blame to an individual (through enhanced accessibility or diagnosticity of the appraisal themes and dimensions) but also result in a stronger desire to take punitive measures against the individual.
The ATF and Individual Differences With the paradigm shift that has been brought about by the ATF, the time might be ripe to revisit the broad area of research on how individuals differ in their experience of emotions and in their behavioral responses to emotions. This line of enquiry can proceed on various fronts. For instance, given that appraisal themes and dimensions are so critical to emotion and its effects on decisions, could we now begin to assess if individual differ on the ease with which certain appraisals get activated and used in decisions? In other words, would it be useful, when it comes to examining individual differences, to focus on antecedents to emotions rather than emotions per se as does the PANAS (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), for instance? A second front could be to tap into recent neuroscience research by Davidson and his colleagues on affective style, which reflects systematic ways in which individuals react and respond to emotion (e.g., Davidson, 2003). Five specific parameters of affective style have been proposed, namely (a) threshold to respond, (b) magnitude of the response, (c) the rise time to the peak of the response, (d) recovery function of the response, and (e) the duration of the response. Of these parameters, of relevance to the ATF are likely to be a and b, both of which get at why some individuals experience emotions at greater or lesser intensity compared to others. Another parameter of interest would be d, which gets at one facet of the ATF; namely, the carryover effects of appraisal tendencies that are activated by various mood states onto subsequent judgments and decisions. Individuals who have a longer recovery function are more likely to be affected by such carryover effects particularly on tasks that
have a large temporal separation from the experience of a mood state.
Identifying Neural Correlates of Elements of the ATF Arguably, some of the most exciting research on emotion is being generated by recent advances in our understanding of its neural correlates, and this trend is only likely to continue in the future. Examining the neural correlates of appraisal tendency offers two potential benefits. First, despite all the advances in neuroscience techniques, including the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, it is interesting to note that thus far there has been very little evidence showing systematic differences in neural activity across various types of emotions, except for differences in the neural circuitry associated with the arousal dimension (Davidson et al., 2000). It might just be that we have been looking up the wrong tree or just a single one-looking for differences in activity in parts of the neural circuitry related to emotion. It might just be that to decipher differences in neural activity across various types of emotions, one needs to look for differences in a constellation of neural circuits related to both arousal and appraisals. The second and probably more important reason to examine the neural correlates of appraisal tendency might be to understand how reliable, stable, and in a sense fundamental are some of the mood-related appraisal tendencies. Two promising candidates for the neural correlates of appraisal tendency seem to be the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The hippocampus plays a crucial role in the very early preattentive stages of information processing particularly in the encoding of context (Davidson, Pizzagalli, Nitschke, & Putnam, 2002). For example, lesions to the hippocampus in animals impair context conditioning, with these animals displaying conditioned responding not merely to contexts they were previously conditioned in but to other contexts as well. Similarly, depressed individuals, some of whom suffer from diminished hippocampus functioning, have been known to exhibit a persistence of sadness in situations that would normally engender happiness. This occurs presumably because such individuals lose the ability to modulate their emotional responses depending on the context. It is, therefore, quite likely that the hippocampus is critical to generating appraisal themes and dimensions, a facet that depressed individuals potentially suffer from. In other words, it is quite possible that appraisal tendencies arise very early in the information processing sequence much before the processing moves to the cortical structures of the brain. If this is found to be the case, the implications for the ATF is that appraisals might be more fundamental than previously thought and also more reliable (i.e., less impervious to factors such as cognitive load, distraction, etc.). Alternatively, it might be the case that appraisals occur at the PFC, which appears to maintain the representation of goals and the means to achieve them (Miller & Cohen,
EMOTIONS, DECISIONS, AND THE BRAIN
2001). If this is found to be the case, then appraisals are likely to be less reliable in their instantiation (i.e., more prone to be affected by factors such as cognitive load, distraction, etc.). A third possibility is that both the hippocampus and the PFC are involved-the hippocampus for the activation of appraisal themes and dimensions and the PFC for the subsequent links to judgment and behavior.
THE FUTURE OF EMOTION AND DECISION MAKING The last decade or so has seen significant advances in the study of emotion and decision making-to borrow a phrase used by my mentor, Jim Bettman, decision-making research has certainly come out of the cold. Apart from significant advances on incidental affect by Lerner and her colleagues in the form of the ATF (e.g., Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007) and Andrade and his colleagues in the form of the AER (e.g., Andrade, 2005), advances have also occurred in the study of task-induced affect (Luce, 1998; Luce, Payne, & Bettman, 1999), integral affect (Nowlis & Shiv, 2005; Shiv & Fedorikhin, 1999; Shiv & Nowlis, 2004), and anticipatory affect (Shiv & Huber, 2000; Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). The question is, where is the next phase of exciting research in this area likely to emerge from? One area that offers rich promise is from the emerging field of research called decision neuroscience, whose primary goal is to integrate research in neuroscience and behavioral decision making (Shiv et al., 2005).
How Can Decision Neuroscience Enrich Research on Emotion? Decision neuroscience offers the promise of deepening our understanding of emotion and decision making in a number of ways. First, and quite obvious, is that neuroscientific methods offer the promise of identifying the neural correlates of various phenomena and, thereby, offer the advantage of providing direct tests for existing as well as new theories. Second, neuroscience can help when questions arise about the very existence of a phenomenon by providing confinnatory evidence about its existence. Take the case of the phenomenon of placebo analgesia, where the mere belief that one is receiving an effective treatment has been shown to alleviate the emotional experience of pain. For a long time, this phenomenon was attributed to a response bias rather than to an actual alleviation of the feelings of pain (i.e., the individual thinks that she or he is experiencing less intense emotions, but the actual level of pain remains unchanged). This belief prevailed until Wager et al. (2004) found that placebo analgesia was associated with actual changes in neural activity, thereby providing confirmatory evidence that placebos do alter the actual experience of pain. Finally, neuroscience can help refine existing theories and frameworks in several ways. Take, for instance, the
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enduring theory of cognitive dissonance, which proposes that a discrepancy between an individual's attitudes and behavior creates an aversive emotional state that, in turn, prompts the individual to remove the discrepancy by altering his or her attitudes to fit with the behavior. Most accounts of the dissonance-reduction process imply that explicit memory is involved in the behavior-induced attitude change. Lieberman and his colleagues (Lieberman, Ochsner, Gilbert, & Schacter, 2001) examined whether explicit memory is necessary or whether the process related to dissonance occurs in a relatively automatic fashion. Their findings suggest the latter-amnesiacs in their study showed no memory for the dissonance-arousing source, yet showed as much dissonance reduction as did normal individuals. From a broader perspective, Lieberman et al. used existing knowledge of brain structure and function to refine the theory of cognitive dissonance.
CONCLUSION Research on emotion and decision making has become vibrant and exciting thanks to paradigm-shifting efforts by researchers such as Lerner and her colleagues (e.g., Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007). My goal in this article was to continue this trend, if not accelerate it. In other words, my goal was to not be a mere spectator and writer of history but to provide the spark for shaping future research on emotion and decision making.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was supported by Grant SES 03-50984 from the National Science Foundation awarded to Irwin Levin and Baba Shiv. I thank Eduardo Andrade for his helpful suggestions and feedback at various stages of this endeavor.
REFERENCES Andrade, E. B. (2005). Behavioral consequences of affect: Combining evaluative and regulatory mechanisms. Journal c f l Consumer Research, 32, 355-362. Andrade, E. B., & Cohen, J. D. (in press). Affect-based evaluatioli and regulation a5 mediators of behavior: The role of affect in risk taking, helping and eating patterns. In K. D. Vohs, R. F. Baumeister, & G. Loewenstein (Eds.), Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? A HedgeJ'Oxian Perspective. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Bechara, A,, Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. R. (2000). Emotion, decision making and the orbitofrontal cortex. Cerebral Cortex. 10, 295-307. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, und the human brain, New York: Putnam. Davidson, R. J. (1998). Affective style and affective disorders: Perspectives from affective neuroscience. Cognition & Emotion, 12, 307-330. Davidson, R. .I.(2003). Affective neuroscience and psychophysiology: Toward a synthesis. Psychophysiology, 40, 655-665.
Davidson, R. J., Jackson, D. C., & Kalin, N. H. (2000). Emotion, plasticity, context, and regulation: Perspectives from affective neuroscience. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 890-909. Davidson, R. J., Pizzagalli, D., Nitschke, J. B., & Putnam, K. (2002). Depression: Perspectives from affective neuroscience. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 545-574. Han, S., Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2007). Feelings and consumer decision making: The appraisal-tendency framework. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17, 158-168. Isen, A. M., & Levin, P. F. (1972). Effect of feeling good on helping: Cookies and kindness. J o u m l of Personality & Social Psychology, 21, 384-388. Isen, A. M., & Simmonds, S. F. (1978). The effect of feeling good on a helping task that is incompatible with good mood. Journal of Personality & Soclal Psychology, 41, 346-349. James, W. (1890, 1952). Principles of Psychology, New York: Holt. Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. H. (1991). The endowment effect, loss aversion, and status quo bias. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5, 193-206. Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2001). Fear, anger, and risk. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 81, 146-159. Lerner, J. S., Small, D. A., & Loewenstein, G. (2004). Heart strings and purse strings. Psychological Science, 15, 337-341. Liebennan, M. D., Ochsner, K. N., Gilbert, D. T., & Schacter, D. L. (2001). Do amnesics exhibit cognitive dissonance reduction? The role of explicit memory and attention in attitude change. Psychological Science, 12, 135-140. Luce, M . F. (1998). Choosing to avoid: Coping with negatively emotionladen consumer decisions. Journal of Consumer Research, 24, 409433.
Luce, M. F., Payne, J. W., & Bettman, J. R. (1999). Emotional trade-off difficulty and choice. Journal of Marketing Research, 36, 143-159. Miller, E. K., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 167-202. Nowlis, S. M., & Shiv, B. (2005). The influence of consumer distractions on the effectiveness of food-sampling programs. Journal of Marketing Research, 42, 157-168. Shiv, B., Bechara, A,, Levin, I., Alba, J. W., Bettman, J. R., Dube, L., et al. (2005). Decision neuroscience. Marketing Letters, 16, 375-386. Shiv, B., & Fedorikhin, A. (1999). Heart and mind in conflict: The interplay of affect and cognition in consumer decision making. Journal of Consumer Research, 26, 278-292. Shiv, B., & Huber, J. (2000). The impact of anticipating satisfaction on consumer choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 27. 202-21 6. Shiv, B., & Nowlis, S. M. (2004). The effect of distractions while tasting a food sample: The interplay of informational and affective components in subsequent choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 31, 599-608. Wager, T. D., Rilling, J. K., Smith, E. E., Sokolik, A,, Casey, K. L., Davidson, R. J., et al. (2004). Placebo-induced changes in fMRI in the anticipation and experience of pain. Science, 303, 1162-1 167. Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 54, 1063-1 070. Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 131-1 34. Zillmann, D. (1971). Excitation transfer in communication-mediated aggressive behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 7, 419-434.
Emotions, Decisions, and the Brain Baba Shiv Stanford Graduate School of Business
This article presents a commentary on the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (ATF) developed by Lerner and her colleagues. The article explores ways by which the ATF can be extended including (a) incorporating elements from other frameworks, (b) incorporating the role of arousal, (c) exploring individual-differencefactors, and (d) examining the neural correlates of some of the key elements of the ATF. The article concludes with a discussion of the promise that decision neuroscience offers to further enrich an already exciting and thriving area of research in emotion and decision making. The history of mankind is the history of ideas. (Ludwig von
Mises, as cited in Planned Chaos, 1947) The main thing is to make history, not write it. (Otto Von
Bismark, as cited in quotationsbook.com) Thomas Kuhn stated in his now-famous book, The Structure of Scientifc Revolutions (1962), that the progress of science is punctuated by paradigm shifts brought about by revolutionary ideas that significantly alter our conceptual worldview. The Appraisal-Tendency Framework (ATF) proposed and developed by Lerner and her colleagues (e.g., Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007) clearly fits with Kuhn's notion of paradigm shifts. As highlighted by Han, Lerner, and Keltner (2007), the conceptual worldview in mood literature had revolved around a valence-based approach, with the focus being on unraveling the effects of positive and negative moods on judgment and decision making. The ATF dramatically changed this worldview by demonstrating, for instance, that two mood states such as fear and anger, although both negative, can yield very different judgmental effects (Lerner & Keltner, 2001). Following this paradigm shift, the study of mood has now become richer and more nuanced, and some of the conflicting findings in the literature have begun to make sense when viewed through the lens of the ATF. Even more dramatic has been the ability to make unique and counterintuitive predictions. Consider, for example, the endowment effect, which has often been views as one of the most robust phenomena in the decision-making literature (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1991). A study grounded in the ATF
Correspondence should be addressed to Baba Shiv, Stanford Graduate School of Business, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305. E-mail: [email protected]
predicted and showed that this phenomenon may not be robust after all-that disgust can eliminate the effect and sadness can actually give rise to a "reverse endowment effect" (Lerner, Small, & Loewenstein, 2004). One could have not even contemplated making such predictions without the ATF. As noted in the second opening quote, my goal for the rest of this commentary is to not be a mere writer of history but to provide the spark for shaping what is to come in the literature on emotion and decision making. To accomplish this goal, I present my commentary in two broad sections. In the first section, I highlight how the ATF can be further strengthened by (a) incorporating elements from other powerful frameworks that have been recently proposed in the mood literature (e.g., Andrade, 2005; Andrade & Cohen, in press); (b) examining the role of arousal, which used to be central to the literature on emotion for a major part of the 20th century but now seems to have taken a backstage role; (c) exploring individual difference factors; and (d) identifying neural correlates to some of the key elements of the ATF. In the second, section, I broaden my focus and highlight the promise that decision neuroscience offers to further enrich the study of emotion and decision making.
EXTENDING THE ATF The ATF and the Affect-based Evaluation and Regulation Framework As with the ATF, another framework that has caught the attention of researchers working on emotion is the Affectbased Evaluation and Regulation (AER> framework developed by Andrade and his colleagues (Andrade, 2005; Andrade & Cohen, in press). In contrast to the ATF, which
EMOTIONS, DECISIONS, AND THE BRAIN
provides a more nuanced appraisal-based approach to examining mood effects, the AER provides a simple but powerful to accommodating divergent streams of mood under one overarching theoretical umbrella. Apart from providing a unifying framework, a major contribution of the AER to the mood literature is in its ability, as with the ATF, to provide a handle for resolving seemingly conflicting findings in the literature. As a starting point, the AER broadly categorizes research on mood into those related to affective evaluation and those related to affect regulation. In the former category of the impact of affect on behavior is construed as arising through a cognitive mediator, with affect influencing cognitions that are brought to bear in the decision in either a direct manner by providing unique information or a more indirect manner by enhancing the accessibility of moodcongruent cognitions. Thus, from a cognitive mediation standpoint, positive affect has a propensity to generate more favorable evaluations of the environment that, in turn, results in proactive action tendencies. In contrast, negative affect has a propensity to generate less favorable evaluations, resulting in inhibitory action tendencies. In the latter category of research, the impact of affect on behavior arises through a motivational mediator, wherein the discrepancy between the affect being currently experienced and that could be experienced in the future as a result of a behavior serves as a motivator to guide behavior. Thus, from a motivation-mediation standpoint, the action tendencies will be the exact reverse of what occurs in the cognitive-mediation category. Specifically, people experiencing positive affect will exhibit inhibitory action tendencies for fear that such actions will threaten the favorable current affective experience. In contrast, people experiencing negative affect will exhibit proactive action tendencies in anticipation of the mood-lifting consequences of such actions. The AER then views the affect-behavior relation as being determined by which of the two parallel mediators have a bigger impact on the behavioral response and, thus, gives a very good handle for clarifying seeming inconsistencies in the mood literature. For example, positive mood has been shown to sometimes increase the propensity to help (Isen & Levin, 1972); sometimes decrease it (Isen & Simmonds, 1978). The AER can account for these discrepant findings by positing that positive mood will increase the propensity to help if the cognitive mediator (i.e., the biasing effects of positive mood on evaluations of helping) has a bigger impact than the motivational mediator. Positive mood will decrease the propensity to help if the situational cues lead individuals to anticipate negative affect if the behavior were enacted and if the motivation to avoid this negative affect (the motivational mediator) has a bigger impact than the cognitive mediator. Some of the core aspects of the AER can easily be brought to bear to enrich and extend the ATF. For instance, one could potentially think of refining the box, "content and
175
depth of thought" in Figure 1 of Kan et al. (2007) by breaking it down further into cognitive versus motivational mediators. Thus, sadness, which yields action tendencies that are aimed at changing the present circumstances (Lerner et al., 2004), could perhaps be construed as an effect that arises more through the motivational route rather than a cognitive route. On the other hand, when sadness shapes perceptions of ambiguous negative events by causing individuals to attribute to the event to situational factors, the resulting effect could perhaps be construed has having arisen more through the cognitive route. Having refined the ATF in this manner, the next step would be to identify task as well as context-related factors that would "swing" the same appraisal tendencies onto either the cognitive route or the motivational route. The AER can serve to refine the ATF in yet another way. As Han et al. (2007) point out, there are a variety of ways in which the affect-behavior link could arise, and that the appraisal tendency route is only one such way. The ATF can be refined and extended by spelling out under what situations is this link likely to be mediated by appraisal tendencies and under what situations is it likely to be mediated by nonappraisal-related factors. Currently, the ATF does not consider the possibility that the same emotion can sometimes be mediated by appraisal tendencies and sometimes by affect regulation. For instance, it does not consider the possibility that at times anxious (vs. sad) people may refrain from taking risks based on the appraisal tendencies that become salient in this state, whereas at other times such people may refrain from doing so based on an affective forecast that taking risks could end up making them feel worse (the source of affect regulation).
Incorporating Arousal Into the ATF The study of emotion has invoked the critical role of arousal, the physiological correlate of emotion. In his book, Principles of Psychology ( 1 890, 1952), William James went to the extent of stating that without the arousal component there can be no emotion-a view that is shared by many to this day (e.g., Bechara, Damasio, & Damasio, 2000; Damasio, 2000). Yet, the ATF does not explicitly invoke the role of arousal in the effects of mood on judgment and behavior. Rather than see this aspect as a weakness, I view it as a tremendous opportunity for refining and extending the framework. The question is, what roles might arousal play in the ATF? My surmise is that arousal could impact the ATF at various levels. First, the level of arousal could alter the likelihood that a particular set of appraisal themes and dimensions will be activated, determine the accessibility of these appraisal themes and dimensions, and thus determine the strength of the affect-decision link. Take, for instance, anger, which is characterized by appraisals of individual control. Some individuals may experience anger with greater arousal than
others due to individual-difference factors (Davidson, 1998) or due to the transfer of affect from a previous task (Zillmann, 1971). The enhanced arousal in some of these individuals could result in the appraisal of individual control being more accessible and, thus, result in stronger downstream effects on judgment and decision making. Second, arousal could affect the metacognitive confidence related to the appraisal themes and dimensions and, thus, influence the strength of the affect-decision link. (See Andrade, 2005, for a discussion on the role of accessibility and diagnosticity in moderating the affect-decision link.) Third, arousal has been known to provide the "mobilizing force or energy" for action tendencies that are recruited by emotion (Davidson, Jackson, & Kalin, 2000). Thus, arousal could affect the strength of the relevant goals that are activated by the appraisal tendencies in response to the emotion in question. For instance, anger accompanied by higher levels of arousal could not only result in greater likelihood of attributions of blame to an individual (through enhanced accessibility or diagnosticity of the appraisal themes and dimensions) but also result in a stronger desire to take punitive measures against the individual.
The ATF and Individual Differences With the paradigm shift that has been brought about by the ATF, the time might be ripe to revisit the broad area of research on how individuals differ in their experience of emotions and in their behavioral responses to emotions. This line of enquiry can proceed on various fronts. For instance, given that appraisal themes and dimensions are so critical to emotion and its effects on decisions, could we now begin to assess if individual differ on the ease with which certain appraisals get activated and used in decisions? In other words, would it be useful, when it comes to examining individual differences, to focus on antecedents to emotions rather than emotions per se as does the PANAS (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), for instance? A second front could be to tap into recent neuroscience research by Davidson and his colleagues on affective style, which reflects systematic ways in which individuals react and respond to emotion (e.g., Davidson, 2003). Five specific parameters of affective style have been proposed, namely (a) threshold to respond, (b) magnitude of the response, (c) the rise time to the peak of the response, (d) recovery function of the response, and (e) the duration of the response. Of these parameters, of relevance to the ATF are likely to be a and b, both of which get at why some individuals experience emotions at greater or lesser intensity compared to others. Another parameter of interest would be d, which gets at one facet of the ATF; namely, the carryover effects of appraisal tendencies that are activated by various mood states onto subsequent judgments and decisions. Individuals who have a longer recovery function are more likely to be affected by such carryover effects particularly on tasks that
have a large temporal separation from the experience of a mood state.
Identifying Neural Correlates of Elements of the ATF Arguably, some of the most exciting research on emotion is being generated by recent advances in our understanding of its neural correlates, and this trend is only likely to continue in the future. Examining the neural correlates of appraisal tendency offers two potential benefits. First, despite all the advances in neuroscience techniques, including the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, it is interesting to note that thus far there has been very little evidence showing systematic differences in neural activity across various types of emotions, except for differences in the neural circuitry associated with the arousal dimension (Davidson et al., 2000). It might just be that we have been looking up the wrong tree or just a single one-looking for differences in activity in parts of the neural circuitry related to emotion. It might just be that to decipher differences in neural activity across various types of emotions, one needs to look for differences in a constellation of neural circuits related to both arousal and appraisals. The second and probably more important reason to examine the neural correlates of appraisal tendency might be to understand how reliable, stable, and in a sense fundamental are some of the mood-related appraisal tendencies. Two promising candidates for the neural correlates of appraisal tendency seem to be the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The hippocampus plays a crucial role in the very early preattentive stages of information processing particularly in the encoding of context (Davidson, Pizzagalli, Nitschke, & Putnam, 2002). For example, lesions to the hippocampus in animals impair context conditioning, with these animals displaying conditioned responding not merely to contexts they were previously conditioned in but to other contexts as well. Similarly, depressed individuals, some of whom suffer from diminished hippocampus functioning, have been known to exhibit a persistence of sadness in situations that would normally engender happiness. This occurs presumably because such individuals lose the ability to modulate their emotional responses depending on the context. It is, therefore, quite likely that the hippocampus is critical to generating appraisal themes and dimensions, a facet that depressed individuals potentially suffer from. In other words, it is quite possible that appraisal tendencies arise very early in the information processing sequence much before the processing moves to the cortical structures of the brain. If this is found to be the case, the implications for the ATF is that appraisals might be more fundamental than previously thought and also more reliable (i.e., less impervious to factors such as cognitive load, distraction, etc.). Alternatively, it might be the case that appraisals occur at the PFC, which appears to maintain the representation of goals and the means to achieve them (Miller & Cohen,
EMOTIONS, DECISIONS, AND THE BRAIN
2001). If this is found to be the case, then appraisals are likely to be less reliable in their instantiation (i.e., more prone to be affected by factors such as cognitive load, distraction, etc.). A third possibility is that both the hippocampus and the PFC are involved-the hippocampus for the activation of appraisal themes and dimensions and the PFC for the subsequent links to judgment and behavior.
THE FUTURE OF EMOTION AND DECISION MAKING The last decade or so has seen significant advances in the study of emotion and decision making-to borrow a phrase used by my mentor, Jim Bettman, decision-making research has certainly come out of the cold. Apart from significant advances on incidental affect by Lerner and her colleagues in the form of the ATF (e.g., Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007) and Andrade and his colleagues in the form of the AER (e.g., Andrade, 2005), advances have also occurred in the study of task-induced affect (Luce, 1998; Luce, Payne, & Bettman, 1999), integral affect (Nowlis & Shiv, 2005; Shiv & Fedorikhin, 1999; Shiv & Nowlis, 2004), and anticipatory affect (Shiv & Huber, 2000; Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). The question is, where is the next phase of exciting research in this area likely to emerge from? One area that offers rich promise is from the emerging field of research called decision neuroscience, whose primary goal is to integrate research in neuroscience and behavioral decision making (Shiv et al., 2005).
How Can Decision Neuroscience Enrich Research on Emotion? Decision neuroscience offers the promise of deepening our understanding of emotion and decision making in a number of ways. First, and quite obvious, is that neuroscientific methods offer the promise of identifying the neural correlates of various phenomena and, thereby, offer the advantage of providing direct tests for existing as well as new theories. Second, neuroscience can help when questions arise about the very existence of a phenomenon by providing confinnatory evidence about its existence. Take the case of the phenomenon of placebo analgesia, where the mere belief that one is receiving an effective treatment has been shown to alleviate the emotional experience of pain. For a long time, this phenomenon was attributed to a response bias rather than to an actual alleviation of the feelings of pain (i.e., the individual thinks that she or he is experiencing less intense emotions, but the actual level of pain remains unchanged). This belief prevailed until Wager et al. (2004) found that placebo analgesia was associated with actual changes in neural activity, thereby providing confirmatory evidence that placebos do alter the actual experience of pain. Finally, neuroscience can help refine existing theories and frameworks in several ways. Take, for instance, the
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enduring theory of cognitive dissonance, which proposes that a discrepancy between an individual's attitudes and behavior creates an aversive emotional state that, in turn, prompts the individual to remove the discrepancy by altering his or her attitudes to fit with the behavior. Most accounts of the dissonance-reduction process imply that explicit memory is involved in the behavior-induced attitude change. Lieberman and his colleagues (Lieberman, Ochsner, Gilbert, & Schacter, 2001) examined whether explicit memory is necessary or whether the process related to dissonance occurs in a relatively automatic fashion. Their findings suggest the latter-amnesiacs in their study showed no memory for the dissonance-arousing source, yet showed as much dissonance reduction as did normal individuals. From a broader perspective, Lieberman et al. used existing knowledge of brain structure and function to refine the theory of cognitive dissonance.
CONCLUSION Research on emotion and decision making has become vibrant and exciting thanks to paradigm-shifting efforts by researchers such as Lerner and her colleagues (e.g., Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007). My goal in this article was to continue this trend, if not accelerate it. In other words, my goal was to not be a mere spectator and writer of history but to provide the spark for shaping future research on emotion and decision making.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was supported by Grant SES 03-50984 from the National Science Foundation awarded to Irwin Levin and Baba Shiv. I thank Eduardo Andrade for his helpful suggestions and feedback at various stages of this endeavor.
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