The impact of emotions on intertemporal decision-making

Everyday, each individual makes tens of thousands remotely conscious decisions, including trade-offs between immediate-small and later-larger rewards. The extent to which individuals prefer sooner rewards while discounting the value of delayed ones is known as delay discounting. Current literature indicates that decision-making, including intertemporal choices, can be modulated by emotions and gender, however the exact interplay remains poorly investigated. Here, following the work by Fiorenzato and colleagues (under review) that provided the first evidence that the discrete emotion of fear can trigger different implicit decisions and intertemporal choices according to gender, we planned to investigate the impact of other discrete emotions – compassion and sexual arousal. To this aim, 75 participants were randomized to different conditions, inducing distinct emotions – compassion, sexual arousal and neutral state – through standardized movie clips, subsequently completing a computerized delay discounting task for hypothetical monetary rewards. Probably due to the small sample size, no significant results emerged from the present analysis. We nevertheless discuss the strengths of the current study and advocate further data collection and research.