Emotional Intelligence training in LucerneA risky decision: is your emotion really about the issue at hand?
A difficult conversation may immediately precede a decision about investment, recruitment or a customer concession. The facts have not changed, but the way the risks are assessed may have shifted.
1. What the literature establishes: negative emotions are not interchangeable
Jennifer S. Lerner and Dacher Keltner (2001, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that fear and anger relate differently to risk judgements: fear is associated with more pessimistic assessments, anger with more optimistic ones. Their account links this difference to the appraisals of certainty and control accompanying these emotions. Simply classifying one's state as “negative” is therefore insufficient to understand its possible influence on a decision.
2. The mechanism: an emotion can carry over to another issue
Jennifer S. Lerner, Deborah A. Small and George Loewenstein (2004, Psychological Science) experimentally induced sadness or disgust before economic decisions unrelated to what had triggered those emotions. Sadness lowered selling prices and increased buying prices, whereas disgust lowered both. These findings illustrate a carryover effect: an emotion arising in one situation can alter the valuation of an object in another.
3. The premature conclusion: decide without emotion
It would be excessive to conclude that good decisions require an absence of emotion. Concern can also draw attention to relevant information; the question is what triggered it and which facts support it. Within SHR's “Emotional Intelligence” programme, this distinction between decision-related emotion and emotion carried over from another event can provide a focus for practice. (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. The limits: an experimental effect is not an individual diagnosis
These studies do not allow us to predict a manager's decision from their apparent emotion. Experimental situations reproduce neither ongoing responsibilities, collective trade-offs nor the full information available in a professional decision. Asking “where does this feeling come from?” is therefore a methodological precaution, not a guarantee of neutrality.
5. A practical check in Lucerne
In Lucerne, tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs provide a relevant setting for this precaution: in the many family-run businesses with short lines of communication and strong regional ties, one manager may move rapidly between very different conversations. As a hypothetical example, a hotel manager might consider a refund request immediately after a dispute with a supplier; before deciding, they would record their emotion, its likely trigger, the refund criteria and their provisional decision. Over one month, for decisions that can wait, they would revisit these notes after a break and record whether the facts or criteria had changed. The proportion of decisions revised without new information would provide a verifiable indicator of judgement stability, not proof that emotion caused the revision. 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
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