ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the challenge of predicting future feelings and emotions and presents examples of impact bias, the tendency to exaggerate future feelings and emotions. It discusses evidence for the somatic marker hypothesis, the idea that unconscious bodily reactions can signal risky choices and deter people from making them. The chapter presents the affect heuristic and the notion of risk as feelings. It also evaluates the role of imagery in emotion and decision making. Classical theories of decision making focus on subjective assessments of outcomes or prospects in terms of their probabilities and utilities, but pay scant regard to the feelings or emotions those outcomes might induce. Paul Slovic and colleagues have investigated many of these ideas about emotional markers and differences in perception of risks across domains and individuals, and have suggested that mental representations of decision stimuli evoke online affective experiences that influence people's perceptions and consequently their judgments and decisions.
