More Than A Feeling: How Emotions Impact Effort-Based Decision-Making

Abstract

Every day decision-making requires individuals to constantly weigh the cost of effort against the value of reward. Though emotion is known to bias our choices, the current literature provides an incomplete understanding of how exactly this occurs, which is often limited to a valence-based approach. To expand our understanding of how emotions impact decision-making, we consider multiple dimensions of affect: valence (i.e., how positive or negative an emotion is) and arousal (i.e., the degree to which an emotion activates you). Participants were randomly assigned into one of four conditions: high arousal, low valence (A+/V-) , low arousal, low valence (A-/V-), low arousal, high valence (A-/V+), and high arousal, high valence (A+/V+). Then, they completed an effort-based decision task with an affect manipulation between trials according to their assigned emotion condition. Participants’ choices were analyzed using both behavioral metrics and a computational model that derived parameters for effort and reward sensitivity. Our results show that emotional states significantly influenced effort sensitivity, while having no detectable effect on reward sensitivity. Specifically, there was a selective modulation where negative valence increased the subjective perception of effort costs without devaluing the associated reward values. Affective states did not alter visual attention. Concordantly, attention failed to predict final choice, indicating that affect biased subjective valuation of effort rather than the information acquisition strategies.