The role of future-oriented affect in decision-making

A significant aspect of human cognition involves planning for the future. To do so, we need to anticipate how different decisions will make us feel — anticipated affect — and balance it with the emotions that future events trigger in us in the present — anticipatory affect. This future-oriented affect can have a profound impact on the way we make decisions. The current thesis aimed to gain a deeper understanding of how these two types of future-oriented affect influence our decision-making processes and how this may relate to their interplay with attention. Using psychophysiology, computational modeling, and brain imaging methods across three experimental studies, we show that anticipatory affect draws attention and modulates decision-making behavior, and that top-down attentional goals modulate neural activity when anticipating future emotions.
In Study 1, we show that the affect gap, a systematic difference in decision behavior under risk when choosing between affect-rich compared to affect-poor outcomes, may be driven by differences in affective arousal across affect-rich and affect-poor choices. In Study 2, we tested an alternative explanation for what could be driving the affect gap, namely that increased affective arousal leads to reduced cognitive resources, thus resulting in simplified decision behaviors; however, we did not find support for this hypothesis. In Study 3, we investigated how attentional deployment, an emotion regulation strategy by which one focuses attention away or towards a given aspect of a stimulus, modulated neural activity during affective forecasting — the process of anticipating future emotions. We show that focusing on the positive part of a bivalent (i.e., simultaneously positive and negative) outcome selectively engages reward-related brain processes, while focusing on the negative recruits regions related to aversion.
Results across the three studies highlight the important effects future-oriented affect has on decision-making processes and its interaction with attention. Affective information about the future can put a person into approach or avoidance states, resulting in simplified decision-making strategies that rely less on cognitive evaluations and more on affective evaluations of the events. Affect both draws attention through its salience, but can also be modulated by attention-based emotion regulation strategies. This research highlights the need for appropriate risk communication, especially in emotionally charged decision contexts.