关键词: 前瞻性情绪, 风险决策, 风险管理, 公共事件, 社会规范, 文化差异

Abstract: This research project explores the emotional mechanisms underlying prosocial and antisocial behaviors in public arenas. We take an empirical approach to studying how anticipatory emotions affect risky decision-making. The studies focus on social norm-violating behaviors and the reactions to these social violations. We first synthesize several influential theories in the literature concerning the roles of emotion in decision-making and developed a hypothesis of anticipatory emotions as an information source for social risks. We define anticipatory emotions as any discrete emotions that are induced from the expected choice options and felt at the time of decision-making, and in turn, regulate the decision behavior. We view anticipatory emotions as mental representations of social risks. We predict that as an essential part of emotional intelligence, anticipatory emotions help decision agents to make use of emotions for assessing expected choice outcomes when making risky decisions in public. Social risks, particularly those posed by antisocial behaviors in public, are characterized by their destructive, emergent, transient, and unpredictable nature. The reactions to these antisocial behaviors need to be quick and unambiguous. However, the probabilities of possible consequences associated with these reactions are usually hard to reckon. Under such conditions, anticipatory emotions provide a and overall risk assessment as a substitute for expected utility, reflecting both the likelihood and severity of expected choice outcomes. Decision rules based on anticipatory emotions are easy to follow. If a person feels excited when anticipating possible outcomes of a prosocial or antisocial action, the person is likely to take the action. In contrast, if one experiences fear when expecting a prosocial or antisocial action, the person is likely to avoid the action. This hypothesis also predicts that anticipatory emotions collectively distinguish different types of social risks. Furthermore, the profile of anticipatory emotions is culturally specific. The more recent categorization of the face, dignity, and honor cultures allows us to make predictions about the emotional characteristics of each culture. As far as we know, little is known about how different combinations of anticipatory emotions determine risky social decision-making in public events. The proposed research project consists of four parts with multiple experiments. Collectively, the proposed studies will examine how anticipatory emotions influence reactions to public risks. Secondly, we explore how dispositional, social, and cultural factors regulate prosocial and antisocial behaviors. The results of these studies will benefit the research in risk management, public policymaking, and provide scientific support to public education, counseling, and civil service training.

Key words: Anticipatory emotions, Risky decision, Risk management, Public events, Social norms, Cultural differences