3 June - Timothy Ketelaar - Perception of Gains & Losses

3 June - Timothy Ketelaar UCLA Communications Studies

Perception of Gains & Losses Emotions, Adaptive Designs and Bird-Brained Utility Functions Much of the literature on emotion and judgment portrays emotions as a source of irrational bias in decision-making. For example, the emotional over-representation of losses relative to gains (the so-called "losses loom larger than gains" effect) is commonly observed in human judgment and is typically presented as evidence of irrational utility functions. Yet, in the behavioral ecology literature, these very same results ("losses loom larger than gains") are observed among foraging animals and these findings are treated as examples of adaptive design. This paper presents an adaptationist view of emotion in which emotional feeling states are viewed as strategic mental states that represent the affordance structure of the current environment. In a series of experiments, it is shown that emotional reactions to gains and losses correspond to several key descriptive properties of Utility functions, including the well-known "Losses loom larger than gains" effect. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding potential applications of emotion research in Game Theory.