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Impact of induced moods, sensation seeking and emotional contagion on economic decisions under risk
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Description: In addition to probabilities of monetary gains and losses, financial risk-taking is influenced by personality traits, socio-economic factors and specific contexts such as emotions and framing. Here, we investigated the effects of joyful, neutral and sad mood states on subjects’ risk-taking behavior in a simple task with safe and risky options. We also analyzed the effect of framing on risk taking. In different trials, subjects were suggested to decide on financial gains vs. losses. Moreover, we investigated the effects of emotional contagion and sensation seeking personality traits on risk taking in this task. Our results partially replicate previous findings regarding the presence of the framing effect and significantly lower risk-taking in sad mood compared to the neutral mood. As a novel finding, we observed that the increased risk-aversion during sad mood was specific to subjects with high sensation seeking score and people with low emotional contagion score. Overall, our results highlight the importance of taking into account personality traits of experimental subjects in financial risk taking studies.