Emotions are essential aspects of human nature and are
expressed through behaviors like body language, facial expression,
speech inflection and so on. Decision-making process is
one of the continuous deliberative processes, being prerogative
and indispensable to everyone. Every day we make numerous
decisions like to get up or sleep for another ten minutes,
to wear blue or red dress, to have coffee or tea, to invest
in new IPO or not. Even to decide or not to decide is again
a decision. People also make decisions by using their intuition.
They trust their "gut feelings" more than they
trust the analytical methods. Although intuition-based decision-making
can find solutions to many problems, reasoning-based decision-making
also has some serious consequences. Decision making is considered
as an interaction between the decision- maker, problem,
and context and placed in a social environment.
Classical theories of decision-making were cognitive in
nature: they assumed that decision-makers dispassionately
evaluated the consequences of alternative courses of action
and chose the one that would yield the most positive consequences
(Loewenstein and Lerner, 2003). Researches have shown the
influential effects of emotions on decision-making and elementary
part of valid theories of decision-making. It derives its
framework from various fields of study like psychology,
economics, operational research and neuroscience.
In other words, emotions can be fuzzy subset of a larger
class of states and processes that can arise out of interactions
between different mechanisms in a system. Emotions alter
our thoughts, behavior, and underlying biology. The important
element of emotional decision is to assign importance, attention,
memory, social perception, information processing and mood
swings. Emotions can be described as feeling good or bad.
Good feeling being advantageous to the human being whereas
bad feeling being detrimental to them. We often have emotional
memories and tend to remember feelings much longer and with
easier and clearer recall than detailed inputs.
Emotions are termed as "molecular messengers"
affecting the major organs and causing an impact on health
and energy. This shows that emotions are part and parcel
of everyday existence. Moods are the long-term emotions
that people can find themselves in, such as pessimism, optimism,
melancholy, resentment and anxiety. Emotions are responses
to specific events and can be divided into positive emotions
and negative emotions. Negative emotions arising out of
unpleasant experiences can increase costs and decrease profits.
Emotions such as feelings of being stressed, neglected,
unsatisfied, disappointed, hurried and irritated, annoyance
can reduce their rationality for the best of decision. Positive
emotions are attention, recommendation and advocacy that
arise out of positive experience and drive values. It evokes
stimulated, interested, exploratory, valued, trusted, focused,
and safe energetic emotions which are short-term in nature
and stir up human being to go for a favorable decision.
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