Risk attitudes in the gain domain are influenced by music-evoked incidental emotions.

Affective processes are increasingly understood as an integral part of decision making under risk. Even incidental emotions that arise from factors unrelated to the decision have been reported to affect behavior. We investigated the influence of music-induced incidental emotions on risk attitudes in a within-subject design. The conditions differed in the kind of music being played to subjects (happy or sad music, simple tone sequences, or no music). In each condition, subjects then completed a repeated pairwise lottery-choice task. Risk attitudes were analyzed by calculating the degree to which the riskier lottery was chosen and by estimating parameters of subjects' utility and probability-weighting functions in the different conditions. We observed changes in subjective emotion ratings immediately after the musical stimulation that corresponded to the type of music played. Concerning risk attitudes, we found evidence in favor of an effect of incidental emotions. Participants displayed lower risk aversion after listening to happy music than after listening to sad music. Depending on the structural regression model we use, this is reflected in changes in the estimated curvature of subjects' utility function or in the degree of pessimism incorporated in subjects' probability-weighting function. Implications for future research in order to disentangle these two effects are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]