The relationship between emotion, cognition and decision making. A conceptual framework

Understanding the effect of emotions and moods on judgment and decision-making is a “hot topic” (Cardon, Foo, Shepherd, and Wiklund, 2012) across different disciplines, from philosophy, passing to economics and management, to neuroscience (Lerner, Li, Valdesol, and Kassam, 2015). “Affect is a pervasive part of the way we see the world” (Forgas, 1995: 40) and as Simon pointed out after developing his theory on decision making: “[…], in order to have anything like a complete theory of human rationality, we have to understand what role emotion plays in it” (Simon, 1983: 29). Literature on decision-making has a relatively long story. Laboratory researches and real case studies were developed during the last thirty years but, until now, few works have investigated the emotional side of decision (Brudin and Gustafsson, 2013).