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Fear can significantly influence women’s preference for immediate financial rewards over larger, delayed ones, a decision-making bias known as “delay discounting.” At the same time, men’s choices remain unaffected by their emotional state.

At least according to a recent study published in the open-access journal Plos One.

For those who don’t often peruse neuroscience journals, this means that women are far more likely to make decisions for shorter gain when they’re afraid, compared to men who seem to take a ‘long view’ regardless of whether they experience fear.

The findings highlight the complex interplay between gender, emotion, and decision-making, and suggest that ’emotion-regulation’ differences might be evolutionary.

Decision-making is complex and still not fully understood, especially when weighing short- versus long-term benefits or costs. The known phenomenon of “delay discounting” describes the common tendency to prefer an immediate reward rather than a later one, even if the later reward is significantly greater.

This is often illustrated with the well-known ‘marshmallow test’, where children are left with a single sweet – with the promise of another if they don’t touch the first for ten minutes. Most kids can’t wait, and gobble up the treat immediately.

In this study, lead researcher Eleonora Fiorenzato and colleagues examined how emotions like fear and joy, along with gender, affect decision-making, especially when weighing immediate versus later rewards among 308 participants.

Survey participants were shown a brief standardised and validated movie clip intended to induce an emotional state—for the fear group, this was a scary movie, like The Sixth Sense or Silence of the Lambs. For the ‘joy group’, it was a positive clip with subjects like forests or waterfalls; the neutral affect group watched a documentary clip on urban environments.

Then, the subjects were asked hypothetical reward questions such as: “Would you rather have €20,000 today or €40,000 after 3 years?”

Women in the fear group were significantly more likely to use “delay discounting” when choosing financial rewards (selecting the immediate, smaller amount), compared to men in the fear group. Interestingly enough, the men’s decisions were similarly unaffected in the joy and neutral group – suggesting men’s decision-making on monetary rewards is unaffected by their emotional state.

Just before you get ahead of yourself, there’s no qualifying which decision faculty is better or worse. There is likely a benefit to making decisions on a whim, or for the long term, depending on several factors.

The findings suggest that fear specifically might provoke different types of time-bound decision-making for women versus men—the authors speculate these may be due to either differences in evolutionary strategies around safety versus risk, or different emotion-regulation approaches in stressful situations.

“Women are more prone to choose immediate rewards when in a fearful emotional state than when in joyful one. Our research underscores the importance of gender as an influential factor in the interaction between emotions and decision-making processes.”

This study is not definitive, but it seems fear can trigger different financial choices according to gender, possibly reflecting the different evolutionary strategies men and women have adopted over the ages.

Their words, not ours. But in a zombie apocalypse, it seems best to let hubby hold on to the credit cards.

[source:neurosciencenews]