Emotional bias

An emotional bias is a distortion in cognition and decision making due to emotional factors.

For example, a person might be inclined:

  • to attribute negative judgements to neutral events or objects;[1][2]
  • to believe something that has a positive emotional effect, that gives a pleasant feeling, even if there is evidence to the contrary;
  • to be reluctant to accept hard facts that are unpleasant and give mental suffering.
  1. ^ Barrett LF, Bar M (May 2009). "See it with feeling: affective predictions during object perception". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences. 364 (1521): 1325–34. doi:10.1098/rstb.2008.0312. PMC 2666711. PMID 19528014.
  2. ^ Blanchette I (2010). "The influence of affect on higher level cognition: A review of research on interpretation, judgement, decision making and reasoning". Cognition and Emotion. 24 (4): 561–595. doi:10.1080/02699930903132496. S2CID 144271056.