Differential Influences of Integral and Incidental Emotion on Cancer-related Judgments and Decision Making

Despite evidence that both integral (i.e., related to the decision) and incidental (i.e., unrelated to the decision) emotions influence cancer-related decision making, no research has systematically examined whether these two types of emotion generate similar patterns of influence, as predicted by decision-making models. This is important because incidental emotions are often used experimentally to draw causal conclusions about how emotions influence cancer-related decisions with the notion that results will generalize to produce knowledge about integral emotions as well. Across three studies, we plan to directly compare integral and incidental emotional influences on judgments and decisions related to cancer control. We plan to examine whether effects are contingent on the type of emotional influence (the discrete emotions anger and fear, or general positive affect) or type of emotion induction (video, autobiographical induction, or evaluative conditioning). Across experiments, we predict that emotion will influence both judgment and decision-making outcomes when the induced emotion is integral as well as when it is incidental. However, we predict that the magnitude of the effect of emotion on these types of responses will be significantly greater when emotions are integral to a judgment or decision, compared to when emotions are incidental.