{"pk":29641,"title":"Emotion, entropy evaluations and subjective uncertainty","subtitle":null,"abstract":"A variety of conceptualizations of psychological uncertaintyexist. From an information-theoretic perspective, probabilisticuncertainty can be formalized as mathematical entropy. Cog-nitive emotion theories posit that uncertainty appraisals andmotivation to reduce uncertainty are modulated by emotionalstate. Yet little is known about how people evaluate proba-bilistic uncertainty, and about how emotional state modulatespeople’s evaluations of probabilistic uncertainty and behaviorto reduce probabilistic uncertainty. We tested intuitive entropyevaluations and entropy reduction strategies across four emo-tion conditions in the Entropy Mastermind game. We used theunified Sharma-Mittal space of entropy measures to quantifyparticipants’ entropy evaluations. Results suggest that manypeople use a heuristic strategy, focusing on the number of pos-sible outcomes, irrespective of the probabilities in the proba-bility distribution. This result is surprising, given that previouswork suggested that people are very sensitive to the maximumprobability when choosing queries on probabilistic classifica-tion tasks. Emotion induction generally increased participants’heuristic assessment. The uncertainty associated with emo-tional states also affected game play: participants needed fewerqueries and spent less time on games in high-uncertainty thanin low-uncertainty emotional states. Yet entropy perceptionswere not related to subjectively reported uncertainty, numer-acy or entropy knowledge, suggesting that entropy perceptionsmay form an independent psychological construct.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Entropy; human entropy intuitions; Sharma-Mittalspace; emotion; uncertainty"}],"section":"Poster Session 1","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5hf6f0rb","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Lara","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bertram","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Surrey","department":""},{"first_name":"Eric","middle_name":"","last_name":"Schulz","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics","department":""},{"first_name":"Matthias","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hofer","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics","department":""},{"first_name":"Jonathan","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Nelson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Surrey","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29641/galley/19499/download/"}]}