ABSTRACT
Imagine that you are purchasing a new car and have narrowed down your decision to two options. One of the cars is much safer, but costs more; the other is less safe but also less expensive. The car you select will depend on the tradeoffs that you are willing to make between safety and cost. We are interested in how trade-offs such as this one generate different degrees of negative emotion and how decision makers cope with actual or potential choice-generated negative emotion. Trade-offs are a fundamental aspect of choice, as decision-making is essentially the process of accepting less of one choice attribute in order to get more of another (unless the choice is trivial, such as when a dominating alternative exists). Thus, much behavioral decision research (BDR) focuses on when and how people make trade-offs (see Bettman, Luce, and Payne 1998 for a recent review). This chapter outlines our research stream, specifically addressing the effects of emotional sources of trade-off difficulty on decision-processing patterns and choice outcomes.
