Emotional Reasoning and Decision Making: understanding and regulating emotions that serve people's goals

Abstract

Increasing physical activity and adopting a healthy diet have the goal to enhance consumer welfare. The goal of this set of studies is to contribute to a research agenda that tries to support and enhance the life of consumers, through the exploration of emotional intelligence as a new possible avenue of research related to consumer behavior and health.

Four studies are proposed that look at the possibility to introduce emotional intelligence in decision making and performance related to health (i.e. adoption and maintenance of a healthy diet/weight).

The findings suggest the salient role of emotional reasoning (i.e. understanding and regulation of emotions) on decision making and performance related to health. Training on emotional intelligence and health seems to activate mechanisms that help people to use their knowledge in the right direction in order to make better decisions and improve performance related to health (i.e. adoption/maintenance of healthy diet/weight).