Mood and the speed of decisions about anticipated resources and hazards

In addition to triggering appropriate physiological activity and behavioural responses, emotions and moods can have an important role in decision making. Anxiety, for example, arises in potentially dangerous situations and can bias people to judge many stimuli as more threatening. Here, we investigated the possibility that affective states may also influence the time taken to make such judgements. Participants completed the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) mood inventory [Watson, D., Clark, L.A., Tellegen, A. Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS scales. J Pers Soc Psychol, 54 (1988) 1063-1070] and undertook a computer-based task in which they were required to decide whether ambiguous and unambiguous predictor stimuli heralded resources or hazards. While the two types of negative mood indicators measured by PANAS [high negative activation (high NA), a danger-oriented state such as anxiety, and low positive activation (low PA), a state related to loss or absence of opportunity, such as sadness] both biased decisions similarly toward:; expecting hazards and away from expecting resources, only individual variation in NA was associated with the speed at which these decisions were made. In particular, participants reporting higher NA showed a bias towards caution, being slower to decide that stimuli predicted hazards and not resources. These findings are discussed in terms of the Smoke Detector Principle in threat detection [Nesse, R.M. Natural selection and the regulation of defenses. A signal detection analysis of the smoke detector principle. Evol Hum Behav, 26 (2005) 88-105] and the potential value of speed-accuracy tradeoffs in the context of decision making in differing mood states, and the processes that might give rise to them. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All tights reserved.