The Role of Emotions and Regulatory Focus in Decision Making That Involves Risk Tradeoffs

Given that many preventive and therapeutic treatments for cancer lower the risk of one disease, but increase the risk of another disease (or have substantial side effects), patients and doctors often must make medical decisions that involve tradeoffs. When faced with these tradeoffs, people make decisions based on factors beyond objective probability estimates. Emotions and regulatory focus are known to influence judgment and risk propensity in non-tradeoff decision-making contexts, but little is known about their independent and joint effects on decision making in tradeoff scenarios where both options involve some degree of risk. This study aims to generate fundamental knowledge about how individuals make decisions in the context of these tradeoffs, and whether individuals with clinical disorders or at risk for clinical disorders differ from healthy individuals in their decision making. This will have immediate translational potential for applied studies of decision making among cancer patients and those at increased risk for cancer. We plan to examine the effects of discrete incidental affect on tradeoff decision making, and the role of regulatory focus as a moderator of its effect. During visits to a laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, human subjects aged 18 to 70 will be randomly assigned to write about an emotional event (something that made them angry or afraid depending on study condition) or about a room in their house (neutral emotion condition). Then, they will read a series of scenarios that describe a pill that lowers their risk of one health condition, but raises their risk for another. After each, they will indicate their willingness to take the pill. Regulatory focus, risk perceptions, and implicit measures of risk propensity and anticipated emotions will also be assessed. Drawing on previous research, we hypothesize that participants asked to recall an angry experience will be more willing to take the pill, and that this effect will be particularly strong for those with a promotion-oriented regulatory focus. Prevention-focused participants asked to recall an experience that made them feel afraid are expected to be least willing to take the pill. We will also explore possible mechanisms underlying the emotion induction s effect on pill choice, such as shifts in risk perceptions, biased attentional focus, and implicitly measured anticipated emotions.