Jennifer Lerner
Carnegie Mellon University

 

http://lerner.socialpsychology.org/

Thursday, May 25th, 2006

Psychology Building, Room 035, at 4:00 PM 

 

 

 

Heart Strings and Purse Strings: Effects of Incidental Emotions on Economic Decisions

Among the many recent studies that document carry-over effects of emotions (i.e., emotional biases), few have examined emotional carry-over to behavior with financial consequences. This gap is significant, for two reasons. First, including financial consequences provides a stronger test of emotional carry-over hypotheses. It may be that emotions have little impact when real money is at stake. Second, the field of behavioral economics (i.e., the application of psychological insights to economics) has been strongly influenced by cognitively focused research on decision-making but has been largely untouched by the renaissance in emotion research. I will present four studies that seek to bridge this gap, each building on an Appraisal-Tendency Framework (Lerner & Keltner, 2000; 2001; Lerner & Tiedens, in press).