The Internal State Mediating between Decision-Making and Arousal

Abstract

To improve cognitive performance with the support of computational systems such as virtual agents, it is necessary to examine changes in decision-making caused by emotions. Many studies have examined the relationship between emotions and decision-making by manipulating external factors. However, most of these studies only present the stimuli that evoke emotions and do not consider the internal characteristics of the participants. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the interactions between the internal and external factors. Based on the dual-process model of decision-making, the fast process (System 1) and the slow process (System 2) were considered as internal factors of the decision-makers. To examine the effect of each internal factor, two experiments were conducted,where participants completed a gambling task, in which multimodal external factors, such as the lightning color as a visual stimulus, the background music (BGM) as an auditory stimulus, and the facial expressions of agents as a social stimulus, were manipulated. In Experiment 1, the participants' processes were assumed to be under System 1, as their attention was reduced in crowdsourcing experiments. In Experiment 2, the state of the participants was assumed to be under System 2 by implementing additional rewards, depending on the score and questions for rule confirmation. Consequently, the arousal level evoked by stimuli was found to have a significant impact on decision-making in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2. The indices of decision-making that varied with stimuli were also different between the two experiments. Thus, the distinction between the two processes intermediates the effects of emotional arousal on decision-making.