Emotional stress & decision-making: an emotional stressor significantly reduces loss aversion

Stress influences loss aversion, the principle that losses loom larger than gains, although the nature of this relationship is unclear. Studies show that stress reduces loss aversion; however, stress response has been only studied by means of physiological measures, but the stressor emotional impact remained unclear. Since emotions can modify stress response and increase the activity of the loss aversion neural substrates, it could be expected that an emotional stressor may produce the opposite effect, i.e. loss aversion increase. 69 participants were divided into experimental and control group. The first one was exposed to emotional stress through a 5-minutes video, and control group viewe…