Emotional Processes in Learning Situations

5The Role of Emotion and Learning in Decision-making Situations During Development

Anaïs OSMONT¹, Ania AÏTE² and Marianne HABIB³

¹Centre PsyCLé, Aix-Marseille Université, Aix-en-Provence, France

²LaPsyDÉ, CNRS, Université de Paris, France

³DysCo, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, France

Our daily lives are made up of small or more important decisions that will impact our near or distant future to various degrees, such as deciding on our next meal, which friends to spend time with, where to go on vacation, how to get to work or what career path to take. The earliest decision-making models sought to understand how individuals make decisions, in order to predict their choices based on the available options. These models, known as normative models, considered emotions as an epiphenomenon and not as an integral part of the decision-making process. Since then, psychological research has made considerable progress, and Antonio Damasio postulates that the absence of emotions is just as harmful to the decision-making process as an excess of emotions (Damasio 1994). Developmental psychology has made it possible to better define the interactions between emotion and cognition during the decision-making process, from childhood through to adulthood. The study of decision-making processes represents an opportunity for developmentalists, because it involves many learning situations, in order to make better choices in the future. For example, a child who decides to climb on an unstable ...