Is there any relationship between emotions and decision making

Abstract

Everyone has to make decisions in his/her personal and professional life. Decision making is a cognitive process where outcome is a choice among multiple alternatives. Making decisions cannot be constituted merely by rational modality but it is rather powerfully influenced by emotions. Emotion is the vital component of human mental processes by which one can "wilfully" make a decision, intensely manifest a feeling, automatically react to an unexpected stimulus, and constructively or destructively participate in one's reasoning. Having such important roles in human mental life, emotion was regrettably ignored as a scientific topic throughout twentieth century both in the field of psychology and neuroscience. But nowadays, many neuroscientists, including Antonio Demasio, have also endorsed emotion, arguing that “emotions not only regulate our social encounters, but they also influence our cognition, perception and decision-making through a series of interactions with our intentions and motivations (Damasio 1994; Scherer, 2001). Emotions are the centre of many areas of psychology therefore psychologists spend their time to help people to control their negative emotions, and sometime they have to explain that why people make some decisions.