Abstract
Emotions are a fundamental aspect of human experience, shaping the way we think and interact with the world. Decades of psychological research have shown that emotions influence cognitive processes on a fundamental level. However, traditional cognitive approaches typically exclude emotions from their study of human cognition, viewing emotions as sand in the gear or unsystematic noise.
In my PhD research I adopted a psychological perspective on human cognition, taking into account emotions as a potential source of systematic inter- and intrapersonal variability in information processing. More specifically, I investigated how emotions modulate the way people subjectively perceive and evaluate probabilistic information, also known as subjective probability.
Extending previous work in this field, my research looked at how emotions differing in valence (how positive or negative an emotion is), dominance (the feeling of control associated with an emotion), and cognitive appraisal patterns (subjective appraisals of certainty and control) modulate human perceptions of abstract and affectively neutral probabilistic information. Across a number of studies, I investigated the role of these emotion characteristics in subjective assessments of probabilistic uncertainty (mathematical entropy), strategy selection aimed at reducing probabilistic uncertainty, subjective assessments of compound probabilities, and the developmental trajectory of probabilistic cognition.
Results from my research support the hypothesis that emotions shape probabilistic cognition on a fundamental level, even if this information is abstract an in itself emotionally neutral. This finding helps explain previously found effects of emotions on subjective risk and information processing. I also found that the emotion dimension dominance was a particularly good predictor of individual differences in subjective probability. This suggests that emotional dominance, which has been relatively neglected in the emotion and cognition literature, may be a unifying concept explaining previously found effects of emotional valence and cognitive appraisals of certainty and control on probabilistic thinking.