Subjective probability is modulated by emotions

Information about risks and probabilities is ubiquitous in our environment, forming the basis for decisions in an uncertain world. Emotions are known to modulate subjective probability assessments when probabilistic information is emotionally valenced. Yet little is known about the role of emotions in subjective probability assessment of affectively neutral events. We investigated this in one correlational study (Study 1, N = 162) and one experimental study (Study 2, N = 119). As predicted, we found that emotional dominance modulated the degree of conservatism in respondents’ neutral probability estimates. Remarkably, this pattern also transferred to realistic risk assessments. Furthermore, respondents’ tendency to use the representativeness heuristic as a proxy for probability was increased in high dominance individuals. Our findings highlight the importance of considering emotions, particularly the little-understood emotion dimension dominance, in research on probabilistic cognition.