Philosophers have long tussled over whether moral judgments are the products of logical reasoning or simply emotional reactions. From Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility to the debates of modern psychologists, the question of whether feeling or sober rationality is the better guide to decision making has been a source of controversy. In Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? Kathleen Vohs, Roy Baumeister, and George Loewenstein lead a group of prominent psychologists and economists in exploring the empirical evidence on how emotions shape judgments and choices. Researchers on emotion and cognition have staked out many extreme positions: viewing emotions as either the driving force behind cognition or its side effect, either an impediment to sound judgment or a guide to wise decisions. The contributors to Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? provide a richer perspective, exploring the circumstances that shape whether emotions play a harmful or helpful role in decisions. Roy Baumeister, C. Nathan DeWall, and Liqing Zhang show that while an individual's current emotional state can lead to hasty decisions and self-destructive behavior, anticipating future emotional outcomes can be a helpful guide to making sensible decisions. Eduardo Andrade and Joel Cohen find that a positive mood can negatively affect people's willingness to act altruistically. Happy people, when made aware of risks associated with altruistic acts, become wary of jeopardizing their own well-being. Benoît Monin, David Pizarro, and Jennifer Beer find that whether emotion or reason matters more in moral evaluation depends on the specific issue in question. Individual characteristics often mediate the effect of emotions on decisions. Catherine Rawn, Nicole Mead, Peter Kerkhof, and Kathleen Vohs find that whether an individual makes a decision based on emotion depends both on the type of decision in question and the individual's level of self-esteem. And Quinn Kennedy and Mara Mather show that the elderly are better able to regulate their emotions, having learned from experience to anticipate the emotional consequences of their behavior. Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? represents a significant advance toward a comprehensive theory of emotions and cognition that accounts for the nuances of the mental processes involved. This landmark book will be a stimulus to scholarly debates as well as an informative guide to everyday decisions.

This book reviews the latest research from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics evaluating how people make financial choices in real-life circumstances. The volume is divided into three sections investigating financial decision making at the level of the brain, the level of an individual decision maker, and the level of the society, concluding with a discussion of the implications for further research. Among the topics discussed: Neural and hormonal bases of financial decision making Personality, cognitive abilities, emotions, and financial decisions Aging and financial decision making Coping methods for making financial choices under uncertainty Stock market crashes and market bubbles Psychological perspectives on borrowing, paying taxes, gambling, and charitable giving Psychological Perspectives on Financial Decision Making is a useful reference for researchers both in and outside of psychology, including decision-making experts, consumer psychologists, and behavioral economists.

Emotion can impact various aspects of our cognition and behavior, by enhancing or impairing them (e.g., enhanced attention to and memory for emotional events, or increased distraction produced by goal-irrelevant emotional information). On the other hand, emotion processing is also susceptible to cognitive influences, typically exerted in the form of cognitive control of motion, or emotion regulation. Despite important recent progress in understanding emotion- cognition interactions, a number of aspects remain unclear. The present book comprises a collection of manuscripts discussing emerging evidence regarding the mechanisms underlying emotion- cognition interactions in healthy functioning and alterations associated with clinical conditions, in which such interactions are dysfunctional. Initiated with a more restricted focus, targeting (1) identification and in depth analysis of the circumstances in which emotion enhances or impairs cognition and (2)identification of the role of individual differences in these effects, our book has emerged into a comprehensive collection of outstanding contributions investigating emotion-cognition interactions, based on approaches spanning from behavioral and lesion to pharmacological and brain imaging, and including empirical, theoretical, and review papers alike. Co-hosted by the Frontiers in Neuroscience - Integrative Neuroscience and Frontiers in Psychology - Emotion Science, the contributions comprising our book and the associated research topic are grouped around the following seven main themes, distributed across the two hosting journals: I. Emotion and Selectivity in Attention and Memory; II. The Impact of Emotional Distraction; Linking Enhancing and Impairing Effects of Emotion; III. What Really is the Role of the Amygdala?; IV. Age Differences in Emotion Processing; The Role of Emotional Valence; V. Affective Face Processing, Social Cognition, and Personality Neuroscience; VI. Stress, Mood, Emotion, and the Prefrontal Cortex; The Role of Control in the Stress Response; VII. Emotion-Cognition Interactions in Clinical Conditions. As illustrated by the present collection of contributions, emotion-cognition interactions can be identified at different levels of processing, from perception and attention to long- term memory, decision making processes, and social cognition and behavior. Notably, these effects are subject to individual differences that may affect the way we perceive, experience, and remember emotional experiences, or cope with emotionally challenging situations. Moreover, these opposing effects tend to co-occur in affective disorders, such as depression and PTSD, where uncontrolled recollection of and rumination on distressing memories also lead to impaired cognition due to emotional distraction. Understanding the nature and neural mechanisms of these effects is critical, as their exacerbation and co-occurrence in clinical conditions lead to devastating effects and debilitation. Hence, bringing together such diverse contributions has allowed not only an integrative understanding of the current extant evidence but also identification of emerging directions and concrete venues for future investigations.

This book presents selected papers on the factors that serve to influence an individual’s capacity in financial decision-making. Initial chapters provide an overview of the cognitive factors affecting financial decisions and suggest a link between limited cognitive capacity and the need for financial education. The book then expands on these cognitive limitations to explore the tendency for overconfidence in decision-making and the interplay between rational and irrational factors. Later contributions show how credit card companies benefit from limitations in consumer financial literacy, how gender and cognition intersect to play an important role in financial decision-making, and how to improve financial capacity through financial literacy and education campaigns, including those addressing developed marketplaces. This comprehensive collection of papers will be of value to all readers who seek to better understand the multi-factorial and complex nature of personal financial management in today’s economic climate.

Behavioral economics has potential to offer novel solutions to some of today's most pressing public health problems: How do we persuade people to eat healthy and lose weight? How can health professionals communicate health risks in a way that is heeded? How can food labeling be modified to inform healthy food choices? Behavioral Economics and Public Health is the first book to apply the groundbreaking insights of behavioral economics to the persisting problems of health behaviors and behavior change. In addition to providing a primer on the behavioral economics principles that are most relevant to public health, this book offers details on how these principles can be employed to mitigating the world's greatest health threats, including obesity, smoking, risky sexual behavior, and excessive drinking. With contributions from an international team of scholars from psychology, economics, marketing, public health, and medicine, this book is a trailblazing new approach to the most difficult and important problems of our time.

The rapidly growing recognition of the importance of emotion in understanding all aspects of organizational life is facilitating the development of focused areas of scholarship. This volume includes articles, which represent a selection of the papers presented at the sixth International Conference on Emotions and Organizational Life.