Jeremy A. Yip

The Emotionally Intelligent Decision Maker Emotion-Understanding Ability Reduces the Effect of Incidental Anxiety on Risk Taking

In two experiments, we examined how a core dimension of emotional intelligence, emotion-understanding ability, facilitates decision making. Individuals with higher levels of emotion-understanding ability can correctly identify which events caused their emotions and, in particular, whether their emotions stem from events that are unrelated to current decisions. We predicted that incidental feelings of anxiety, which are unrelated to current decisions, would reduce risk taking more strongly among individuals with lower rather than higher levels of emotion-understanding ability. The results of Experiment 1 confirmed this prediction. In Experiment 2, the effect of incidental anxiety on risk taking among participants with lower emotion-understanding ability, relative to participants with higher emotion-understanding ability, was eliminated when we informed participants about the source of their anxiety. This finding reveals that emotion-understanding ability guards against the biasing effects of incidental anxiety by helping individuals determine that such anxiety is irrelevant to current decisions.

Infuriating Impasses: Angry Expressions Promote Exiting Behavior In Negotiations

Prior research has focused on the influence of emotional expressions on the value of negotiated outcomes. Across three studies, we demonstrate that people interacting with angry counterparts become more likely to walk away from a negotiation, resulting in an impasse. In Study 1, participants who encountered counterparts expressing anger were more likely to choose an impasse, relative to those with neutral counterparts. In Study 2, building on the emotion-as-social-information model, we found that inferences of selfishness mediate the effect of angry expressions on impasses. In Study 3, we found that timing moderates the relationship between angry expressions and impasses. Furthermore, we demonstrated that perceptions of inappropriateness mediate the interactive effect of timing and angry expressions on impasses. Taken together, our work reveals that expressing anger is risky in negotiations because people infer that angry counterparts are selfish and become more likely to exit negotiations.