The Role of Emotions in Decision-Making
Abstract: For much of the twentieth century, psychology and economics treated decision-making as an essentially rational exercise in which emotion appeared only as interference. That assumption no longer holds. This paper examines how emotion shapes human judgement and choice, and argues that feeling is not an obstacle to reasoning but a condition of it. It reviews the limitations of the rational-agent model and proposes a structured account built on four established theoretical foundations: the somatic marker hypothesis, the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion, the social intuitionist model of moral judgement, and the appraisal-tendency framework. Drawing on a review of the literature, a detailed account of the emotion-to-decision process, illustrative figures and comparative tables, and four documented lines of case evidence from clinical neuroscience, experimental gambling tasks, moral dilemma research and behavioural economics, the study shows how emotion narrows an otherwise unmanageable field of options, attaches personal value to outcomes and makes judgement possible at all. The paper sets out how distinct emotions exert separable and predictable effects on risk perception, examines applications in clinical practice, law, leadership and artificial intelligence, and weighs the advantages of an emotion-integrated model against the systematic distortions the same mechanisms produce. The central finding is that the practical aim is not the removal of emotion from decision-making, which the clinical evidence suggests is neither possible nor desirable, but the cultivation of emotional awareness sufficient to use it well.
Keywords: emotion, decision-making, somatic marker hypothesis, moral judgement, cognitive bias, appraisal tendency, emotional intelligence, behavioural economics
How to Cite?: Gurparnit Kaur Bhullar, Raghu Raja Mehra, "The Role of Emotions in Decision-Making", Volume 15 Issue 8, August 2026, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 1134-1139, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR26808190257, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR26808190257