Abstract

The existing research on judgment and decision-making under emotion infusion has neglected the information processing perspective. This investigation integrates Information Integration Theory and both evolutionary and neurocognitive perspectives of emotion theory to develop and test a theory of information integration under emotion infusion. This study claims that emotivational goals influence prior decision goals and behavioral tendencies. Furthermore, emotivational goals, prior decision goals, and behavioral tendencies jointly shape patterns of information weight and value and subsequent decisions. Through careful experimental design, this investigation compared the effects of neutral emotions with anxiety, happiness and anger in performing two different tasks. One task asked subjects to assess new alternatives for product development using two decision criteria, namely, R&D risk in the near future and sales risk at a specified future date. The second task required subjects to evaluate their coworkers based on task ability and interpersonal relationship as judgment criteria. The analytical findings partially confirmed the proposed theory.