Emotions in Audience Decision Making 315The Negative Impact of Emotions
Emotions are well known for their negative effects on audience decision making. Emotions can
cause audience members to reverse a prior rational decision, such as a decision to diet, to stop
drinking, or to hold a stock that is dropping in value.^49 Emotions can cause the audience to scru-
tinize information either too much or too little.^50 Emotions can cut short rational processing and
cause audiences to jump to unwarranted conclusions.^51
Thus, emotions can potentially override rational deliberations and can even cause audiencemembers to behave self-destructively.^52 Intense emotions create a sense of urgency that can lead
audience members to respond only to emotion-related cues and unconscious processes^53 and to
engage in automatic and dangerous behaviors.^54 Sometimes intense emotions also lead audience
members to be unreasonably harsh with others. In the courtroom, emotionally arousing testimony
and/or evidence can inhibit rational decision making and lead jurors to render excessively severe
sentencing judgments.^55
Emotions can distort the audience’s judgment about the consequences of their decisions.^56 Forexample, negative emotions can cause investors to be excessively risk-averse and to choose safer
investments such as bonds over higher-performing stocks.^57 Conversely, positive emotions can make
audiences less sensitive to possible risks. For example, cigarette advertising designed to increase
the positive emotions associated with smoking can suppress the audience’s perception of the risks
involved with smoking.^58 Positive emotions have even been shown to lead foreign exchange traders
to take unwarranted risks and to lose money unnecessarily.^59 Positive emotions can lead consumers
to pay twice as much to insure a beloved antique clock as to insure a similar clock of equal value
but to which they have no emotional attachment, all despite the fact that the insurance pays $100 in
both cases.^60 Positive emotions can also make consumers more likely to buy a warranty on a newly
purchased used car when the car is a beautiful convertible than when it is an ordinary-looking sta-
tion wagon even though the expected repair expenses and the cost of the warranty are the same.^61
Emotions can even hamper the audience’s ability to reason logically about logic problems. In aclassic study of emotion versus reason, participants read 20 syllogisms that dealt with emotionally
charged topics and 20 that dealt with emotionally neutral topics. Participants were then asked to
determine if the syllogisms were valid and to state whether they agreed with their conclusions.
Interestingly, the participants were much more accurate judging the validity of the syllogisms deal-
ing with emotionally neutral topics than judging the emotionally charged ones.^62
The Impact of Emotional Defi cits
Ironically, the ability to experience emotions is essential to rational decision making. In spite of
otherwise normal intellectual abilities, patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cor-
tex (vmPFC) are unable to experience emotions and, consequently, have great diffi culty making
rational decisions (see Figure 3.5 , p. 108).^63 These patients often make decisions against their best
interests and repeat prior decisions that led to negative consequences.^64 The decisions they make
often result in fi nancial losses, losses in social standing, and losses of family and friends.
Other symptoms of the emotional defi cits caused by damage to the vmPFC include indecisive-ness, inability to prioritize, inability to plan future activity, inappropriate social manners, disregard
of risks, and lack of concern for others.^65 Yet vmPFC patients possess all of their other faculties,
including normal intelligence, comprehension, memory, and attention.^66
In his book Descartes’ Error , neuroscientist Antonio Damasio described one of his patients withvmPFC damage who, when asked to decide which of two days he would prefer to come for his