The influence of mood on decision-making

This dissertation systematizes the theory of mood influence and shows how the effects of moods unfold in different domains of decision-making. The multitude of emotion theories is organized in this thesis along the three frameworks: content-related, process-related, and regulation-related theories. With regard to the empirical work, the dissertation comprises four experimental studies that manipulated the mood of the participants and examined the differences in their decisions or decision-making strategies. The first project was dedicated to the study of decision strategies in a multi-attribute decision task. The experiment was designed to measure the use of compensatory and non-compensatory strategies in different moods and with different types of information representation. The second project extended the research question to decisions based on experience. The foraging paradigm was applied to investigate how mood is related to exploration decisions. The third project examined the mechanisms of mood regulation in relation to the default bias. In the experiment, participants in different moods faced different types of defaults: maintaining the status quo or introducing changes. The fourth project applied the ideas of mood regulation to the methodological question of non-compliance in online studies. The participants of the online-experiment watched mood-inducing videos while the time spent on the web page was measured. In summary, this work has combined decision paradigms and mood theories to clarify mechanisms of interaction between affect and cognition. The thesis concludes that mood influences the decision-making through the informational value of mood and the mood-regulating motivation.