Abel Lara, Schulz Eric, Nelson Jonathan D
School of Psychology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK.
Research Strategy Office, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Sci Rep. 2025 Mar 14;15(1):8895. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-92230-2.
Information about risks and probabilities is ubiquitous in our environment, forming the basis for decisions in an uncertain world. Emotions are known to modulate subjective probability when probabilistic information is desired (as in gambles) or undesired (as in risks). Yet little is known about the role of emotions in shaping the subjective probability of affectively neutral events. We investigated this in one correlational study (Study 1, N = 162) and one experimental study (Study 2, N = 119). As predicted, we found that participants higher in emotional dominance were more conservative in their probability estimates, avoiding the extremes. Remarkably, this pattern also transferred to realistic risk assessments. Furthermore, respondents' tendency to use the representativeness heuristic as a proxy for probability was increased in high dominance individuals. Our findings suggest that emotional dominance may be a unifying construct explaining previously reported effects of emotions on probabilistic cognition.
有关风险和概率的信息在我们的环境中无处不在，构成了在不确定世界中做出决策的基础。众所周知，当需要概率信息（如在赌博中）或不需要概率信息（如在风险中）时，情绪会调节主观概率。然而，关于情绪在塑造情感中立事件的主观概率方面所起的作用，我们知之甚少。我们在一项相关性研究（研究1，N = 162）和一项实验研究（研究2，N = 119）中对此进行了调查。正如预测的那样，我们发现情绪支配性较高的参与者在概率估计上更为保守，避免极端情况。值得注意的是，这种模式也适用于现实的风险评估。此外，高支配性个体使用代表性启发法作为概率替代指标的倾向有所增加。我们的研究结果表明，情绪支配性可能是一个统一的结构，能够解释先前报道的情绪对概率认知的影响。
