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B.A. Mellers, A. P. McGraw,Anticipated emotions as guides to choice, Current Directions

in psychological science 2001, vol. 10 (6).

Abstact:

The paper regard an impact of emotions on decision making process. The role of emotions inthis process seems to be unquestioned and consequently in ethics, morality and law where it

seems to be a central issue. Moreover recent results in neuroscience researches on moral

judgments show how important are emotions for the above mentioned decision making

process.

In the paper authors present the theory of anticipated pleasure called decision affect theory

and show how it relates to the decision making. It is claimed that when making decision,

people anticipated the pleasure or pain of future outcomes, weigh those feelings by the

chances they will occur, and select the option with grater average pleasure. Emotions are

compared to the utility term which determines a choice from a set of possible of choices. The

authors show some differences in utility and emotions from the other hand. Utility is rather

stable description of outcomes, emotions are influenced by many variables. For example theoutcome of the unchosen gamble was more appealing anticipated pleasure decreased. This is

because people anticipate regret when they imagine having made the wrong choice. The

authors show changes in the magnitude of emotions when the effect was more suprising. The

authors came to conclusions that utilities do differ from anticipated pleasure. In most theories

of choice utilities depend only on the status quo, bit no other reference points. Anticipated

pleasure depends on multiple reference point. Furthermore in most theories of choice utilities

are assumed to be independent from beliefs. In contrast anticipated pleasure of outcomes

varies systematically with beliefs about their occurrence; anticipated feeling associated with

suprising outcomes are amplified relative to anticipated feeling associated with expected

outcomes.

Comments:

Paper is short and rather more general. However it shows the one important thing that I briefly

outlined in the paper Extremes meet each other maybe general rule determining particular

choice in the decision making process is the simple one {max (U)} and maybe it is enough to

replicate some kind of intelligent decision maker however replicating a real human decision

making process require good definition of utility. And when transforming emotions to utility

or utility to emotions hard stuff begins. If we want to build a human level, or more- human

alike program we should program the utility according to all possible knowledge on emotional

results of particular states-actions. This particular thing seems to be imposible.