Student Scholars Day

Incidental Emotion and Intuitive Feelings of Risk

Kirkhof Center KC 79

Research indicates that emotions are essential elements of judgment and decision-making, including risk perception. In the health domain, little research has focused on discrete negative or positive emotions. Research has also been focused on integral emotions or those relating specifically to the decision rather than incidental emotions or those that are contextually unrelated. In this study, we examined whether discrete and incidental emotions of fear, anger, happiness, and surprise influenced people's health-related risk perceptions of cancer. After an emotion induction task, college students completed a set of risk perception measures. Along with traditional risk perception measures, we included a risk perception measure that has been hypothesized to be more affective than traditional measures. In addition to examining the effects of the different emotions on risk perceptions, we examined whether the magnitude of the effects differed depending on the type of risk perception.