Effects of emotional states and difficulties in emotion regulation on risk taking, dishonesty and theory of mind in young people

MICHELINI, YANINA; GODOY, JUAN CARLOS

Montevideo

Congreso; I Congreso Internacional de Psicología.; 2018

Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de la República

Emotions interact with cognition processes. When decision-making processes and regulation abilities are in development yet, emotional states can influence decisions to become them biased and non-adaptive. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of emotional states on risk-taking, dishonesty, and theory of mind in young people. In addition, we explored the role of emotion regulation in the relationship emotion and cognition functions. The final sample consisted of N = 165 college students (53.3% women) from 18 to 26 years old. The mean of age was M = 21,92(SD±2,01). Film clips from LATEMO emotional stimuli database were used for emotional induction. Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) and Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) were used to assess emotional experience before, during and after emotional induction. Six questions were used to evaluate Certainty and Control cognitive appraisal dimensions of emotions. Difficulties in emotion regulation were assessed with State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (S-DERS) immediately after emotion induction. To evaluated risk-taking making Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) was administered. To evaluated dishonesty Dots Task (DT) was used. And to evaluated theory of mind Reading the mind in the Eyes Test (RET) was administrated. Participants were emotionally induced watching four film clips of amusement, anger, fear, sadness or neutral. Then S-DERS, and tasks were administrated. To check emotional manipulation according to type of emotion by sex, repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) were run. Before and during induction significant differences were found in SAM-Valence scores (F(8, 272)=25.99; p=.000; ŋ2p=.43), SAM-Activation scores (F(8, 272)=3.52; p=.001; ŋ2p=.09) and VAS scores (F(8, 272)=2.42; p=.02; ŋ2p=.07) according to Type of Induction. Moreover, women reported more intense emotion during emotional induction than before and after induction (F(8, 272)=2.42; p=.03; ŋ2p=.07). In addition, anger condition reported significantly more certainty (F(4, 139)=3.24; p=.01; ŋ2p=.09) and control (F(4, 139)=6.33; p=.0001; ŋ2p=.15) about your emotional experience than participants in fear condition; and significantly more control than participants in sadness and amusement conditions. To know the effect of emotional conditions by sex on performance in the tasks, analysis of covariance ANCOVA (with S-DERS as a co-variable) and ANOVA were run. We found S-DERS scores significantly predicts the total of correct choices in RET (F(1, 138)=16.11; p=.000; ŋ2p=.10). In relation to DT, we found although there were no significant differences in honest choices between fear and neutral groups (p>.05), women under a fear emotional state made more dishonest decisions than individuals in the neutral condition (F(4, 139)=4.07; p=.004; ŋ2p=.10). Regarding BART, we found participants under a sadness emotional states showed greater risk-taking responses than the participants in the neutral condition (F(4, 138)=3.72; p=.007; ŋ2p=.10). In addition, men showed greater risk-taking responses than women (F(1, 138)=12.26; p=.0006; ŋ2p=.08). Emotional experience associated to uncertainty and lack of control cognitive appraisal components and difficulties in emotion regulation affected risk-taking, dishonesty, and theory of mind processes in young people, with particularities in performance according to the sex of participants.