Research in the field of the relationship between emotion and decision-making has been one of hot topics. Previous research focusing on the relationship found that emotion played an important role in decision-making process. Meanwhile, some other factors, such as gender difference and task difficulty etc., could also influence decision-making. However, the previous research did not focus on the relationship between emotion and crisis decision-making. Accordingly, the purpose of the study was to reveal the impact of emotion as well as some other relative factors on crisis decision-making.

In the study, we recruited 120 undergraduate students and graduate students as participants. All these participants have normal vision and no dyslexia. A 2(gender) ×2(emotion) ×3 (difficulty) experimental design was adapted. The participants were asked to finish the experimental tasks when their two different emotions (neutral vs. negative) were triggered by two pieces of film-fragments respectively. Dependent variables are the time participants spent on crisis decision-making, the ratio of creating new viewpoints, the degree of confidence during the crisis decision-making process and the degree of the satisfaction for the results in crisis decision-making.

MANOVA was applied to the data analysis. The results indicated that: (1) the more difficult the tasks were, the more time participants spent on. Meanwhile, females spent more time when the negative emotion was elicited comparing the time in the neutral emotion condition. Also, in the negative emotion condition, females spent more time than males on crisis decision-making; (2) when participants were asked to produce new viewpoints, males performed better than females; (3) during the crisis decision-making, the confidence degree for males was significantly stronger than that for females. Also, in the easy tasks, participants’ confidence degree was higher in the neutral emotion condition than that in the negative emotion condition; (4) in difficulty II & III tasks, males’ satisfaction degree was higher in the neutral emotion than in the negative emotion. In difficulty Ι & II tasks, females’ satisfaction degree was higher in the neutral emotion than in the negative emotion. Meanwhile, in difficulty Ι tasks, males’ satisfaction degree was higher than that of females in the negative emotion condition.

The results showed that there is obvious main-effect of task difficulty on time of crisis decision-making; moreover, there was significant interaction effect between gender and emotion. About the confidence degree, the performance of male was superior to that of female; meanwhile, there was significant interaction effect between emotion and task difficulty. The satisfaction degree was affected significantly by interaction effect among gender, types of emotion, and task difficulty.