Sambol Stjepan, Suleyman Emra, Ball Michelle
Institute for Health and Sport (IHES), Victoria University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
BMC Psychol. 2025 May 13;13(1):503. doi: 10.1186/s40359-025-02779-w.
Decision-making is integral to navigating everyday life, and understanding the cognitive and emotional factors influencing affective decision-making is crucial.
In this study, 149 participants completed the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) to measure ability emotional intelligence, a N-back working memory task, and three affective decision-making tasks: the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), and Columbia Card Task (CCT).
The results revealed that understanding emotions, a domain of emotional intelligence, was a significant predictor of superior decision-making on both the IGT and CCT, even after controlling for working memory abilities. This finding suggests that the relationship between understanding emotions and affective decision-making is not merely a reflection of general cognitive abilities, but rather highlights the unique contribution of emotional understanding to strategic decision-making in emotionally charged contexts. However, emotional intelligence was not significantly associated with BART performance.
These findings highlight the importance of understanding emotions in strategic decision-making and open avenues for future research to investigate whether training ability emotional intelligence can improve affective decision-making tasks and yield meaningful benefits in real-world contexts.
决策是日常生活中不可或缺的一部分，理解影响情感决策的认知和情感因素至关重要。
在本研究中，149名参与者完成了梅耶-萨洛维-卡鲁索情商测试（MSCEIT）以测量能力情商、一项N-back工作记忆任务以及三项情感决策任务：爱荷华赌博任务（IGT）、气球模拟风险任务（BART）和哥伦比亚卡片任务（CCT）。
结果显示，即使在控制了工作记忆能力之后，情商的一个领域——理解情绪，仍是IGT和CCT上卓越决策的重要预测指标。这一发现表明，理解情绪与情感决策之间的关系不仅仅是一般认知能力的反映，而是突出了情绪理解对充满情感的情境中的战略决策的独特贡献。然而，情商与BART表现没有显著关联。
这些发现凸显了理解情绪在战略决策中的重要性，并为未来研究开辟了道路，以探讨训练能力情商是否可以改善情感决策任务，并在现实情境中产生有意义的益处。
