Emotional Intelligence training in LucerneInvestment decisions: is your emotion really about the proposal?
After a difficult conversation, an investment may suddenly seem riskier or less attractive. Within SHR’s “Emotional Intelligence” programme, this raises a specific question: what underpins our judgement when the facts of the proposal have not changed?
1. What the literature establishes
Jennifer S. Lerner and Dacher Keltner (2001, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that fear and anger are not associated with the same risk judgements: fear favours more pessimistic assessments, while anger favours more optimistic ones. Simply classifying both emotions as “negative” therefore obscures an important distinction. Their explanatory framework focuses particularly on the perceptions of certainty and control associated with each emotion.
2. An emotion can carry over into another decision
Jennifer S. Lerner, Deborah A. Small and George Loewenstein (2004, Psychological Science) elicited emotions unrelated to an economic transaction and then examined the prices participants proposed. Sadness led to lower selling prices but higher buying prices than in the neutral condition. The experiment illustrates a carryover effect: an emotion unrelated to the item being assessed can nevertheless alter its valuation.
3. The hasty conclusion: decide without emotion
These findings do not mean that every emotion is noise to be eliminated. Concern may also draw attention to a genuinely problematic supplier dependency or financial commitment. The useful distinction concerns the emotion’s source: does it respond to evidence in the proposal, or does it originate in an unrelated event? (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. What the evidence does not establish
These studies do not demonstrate that an anxious executive will necessarily reject a profitable investment, or that an angry executive will consistently take excessive risks. Experimental tasks and individual judgements do not fully reproduce an organisation’s collective, documented and revisable decisions. Nor do they prove that identifying an emotion’s origin is sufficient to neutralise its influence.
5. A practical check in Lucerne
In Lucerne, where tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs include many family-run businesses with short decision-making lines, imagine a hotel manager assessing an equipment purchase immediately after a tense complaint: this is a hypothetical example. An exercise proposed within SHR’s “Emotional Intelligence” programme is to record the current emotion, its suspected source, the documented arguments and the recommendation before deciding, then review the proposal at an agreed time without adding information. Over a month, counting recommendations revised without new facts and checking whether their justifications have changed makes the process observable, without automatically attributing those changes to emotions. To go further: explore the Emotional Intelligence training in Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Emotional Intelligence in Lucerne
- emotional intelligence
- Lucerne
- research
- training lucerne