اثر خشم و صفات اضطراب بر روی تصمیمات سرمایه گذاری

This study investigates the extent to which people make financial decisions on the basis of their dispositional tendency to engage in a specific emotion, such as anger or anxiety. We predicted that trait anger is associated with the decision to invest, whereas trait anxiety motivates individuals to avoid investments. We employed a six question survey, considering real life investment decisions, stock trend predictability and preference toward risk investments, and three hypothetic scenarios to measure the participants’ risk attitudes in the area of finance. The results showed that trait anger predicted risky decisions: it was positively associated with the willingness to invest money in different kinds of stocks, preferring medium/long-term investments, and with high predictability assessment in the forecast of stock trends. Contrarily, trait anxiety predicted conservative financial decisions: it was associated with the decision not to invest savings, to hold interest-bearing accounts, and with low predictability of stock trends. In hypothetic scenarios trait anger predicted a medium risk portfolio and the decision to wait before selling both loss and gain investments, while trait anxiety was associated with the preference for a low risk portfolio and with the decision to immediately sell a stock both if it increases or decreases in value. These data are consistent with cognitive models of emotions, highlighting their functional utility and extend the knowledge of the relationship between personality traits and real life investment decision-making.

To successfully navigate the financial world, an individual must be able to distinguish and respond appropriately to different situations which require more proactive, but potentially costly, strategies or more passive, conservative decisions. Emotions such as anxiety and anger serve these different functions: anger has been defined as an “emotional state that consists of feeling that varies in intensity, from mild irritation or annoyance to fury and rage” (Spielberger & Sydeman, 1994) and it tends to promote approach and proactive behavior in the form of attack (e.g., Lerner & Tiedens, 2006). On the other hand, anxiety has been defined as an emotional response involving unpleasant feelings of tension, apprehensive and worried thoughts and it prompts avoidant and conservative behavior (Raghunathan and Pham, 1999 and Wilt et al., 2011). Since emotions have developed through evolutionary processes, they are often functional and important in both the assessment of situations and the consequent decisions (e.g., Finucane et al., 2000 and Hogarth et al., 2011). Previous research has found that emotional states can alter people’s goals, attitudes and perception, (e.g., Forgas, 2000 and Zajonc, 2000). It has been widely accepted that decision making can be influenced by emotional states, involving differences in the way individuals appraise events (e.g., Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2004). According to cognitive models (Beck, 1999 and Eysenck, 1997), emotions are supported and regulated by a variety of cognitive processes: no emotion can be without a cognitive appraisal attributing a meaning to situations. Peters, Västfäll, Gärling, and Slovic (2006) suggested that cognitive assessments of the environment, activated by specific emotions, have an important influence on decision making: they act as informational, motivational and processing functions and so they have specific impacts on outcome effects. Previous studies have shown that anger increases the tendency to perceive situations as predictable, comprehensible and under individual control (Ellsworth, Scherer, Davidson, Scherer, & Goldsmith, 2003), and it increases optimism and feelings of invulnerability (Quigley & Tedeschi, 1996). As a consequence, anger is related to the perception of low risk across new situations (e.g., Lowenstein & Lerner, 2003). On the other hand, anxiety is linked to an attentional bias toward threat-related information and to evaluating ambiguous stimuli as negative ones (e.g., Bar-Haim et al., 2005 and Gu et al., 2010). Moreover, anxiety is associated with the perception of uncertainty, unpleasantness and low situational control (e.g. Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). In this sense, when an individual feels anxious the perception of risk across a situation increases, because of a disproportional dwelling on loss outcomes. In the assessment of emotions, it is important to distinguish between the intensity of the experience of the emotional states and the individual differences in the tendency to react with these specific emotions across time and situations, that is personality traits (e.g., Lazarus, 1994). Over the last 15 years there have been an increasing number of studies about the influence that personality traits have on financial perception and decisions (e.g., Gibson, 2006). Traditionally, economic theory implies that investment decisions should be based on expected utility. That is, the best decisions are those that maximize the expected utility of the money obtained. Economists define risk as an objective index that has to be used when deciding on which solution to invest in. They highlight the importance of looking at the risk/return ratio of the selected investment. From this point of view, investment risk is the variance of stock utility (e.g., Rabin & Thaler, 2001). However, several studies showed that people do not assess investment risk objectively (e.g., Parker & Fischhoff, 2005). Research in judgment and decision making has shown that risk perception, that is the intuitive judgment about the occurrence of negative outcomes and the severity of the associated consequences, and risk acceptance, which involves the subjective balancing of benefits with risks and their acceptability, are influenced by many other factors aside from the utility of money, such as personality traits. A variety of studies have attempted to explore types and traits correlated with investment perception and behavior. For example, Carducci and Wong (1998) found that persons with a Type A personality are more willing to take higher levels of risk in all financial matters than Type B individuals. There is also evidence of a desire for “sensation seeking” by some persons in terms of their financial management (Wong & Carducci, 1991). These personality characteristics, in combination with specific socioeconomic background (i.e. being male, older, married, professionally employed with higher incomes, more education, more financial knowledge, and increased economic expectations), predicted risk acceptance, tolerating declines in the investments’ prices while waiting for them to increase in value, in everyday money matters (Grable, 2000). Fenton O’Creevy, Nicholson, Soane, and Willman (2004) found that successful professional traders for European investment banks, who have likely high levels of risk acceptance, tend to be emotionally stable and open to new experiences. Extraversion and conscientiousness were both found to be positively related to short-term investment intentions (Mayfield, Perdue, & Wooten, 2008). On the other hand, other authors have concluded, without studying large samples of traders, that personality traits are themselves not important for trading and investment decisions (e.g., Lo & Repin, 2005). Regarding the anger and anxiety traits, there is evidence suggesting a relationship between trait anger and risky decisions in hypothetic financial, social and health scenarios (e.g., Gambetti & Giusberti, 2009), as well as a relationship between individual differences in trait anxiety, worry, and social anxiety and risk-avoidance in a behavioral risk-taking task (e.g., Maner et al., 2007). Recently, a study found a significant negative correlation between trait anxiety and investment behavior, but only in the case of the immediate resolution of risk (van Winden, Krawczyk, & Hopfensitz, 2011). In general, although the literature has shown that anger and anxiety traits predict risk perception and risk acceptance, few studies have investigated the relationship between such personality traits and real life investment decisions. Research in this field is in fact primarily experimental and there is a general disagreement about the level of external validity of the results because this kind of studies tested participants in artificial conditions that bear little resemblance to the outside world (e.g., Gigerenzer, 2008). Thus, it is important to further investigate whether anger and anxiety traits play different roles in investment perception and decision in real domains of human life. 1.1. The current study Some studies suggest that personality traits resemble momentary emotions in important ways and should thus yield similar effects on judgments and decisions (e.g., Gross, Sutton, & Ketelaar, 1998). Since the evaluation of an expected outcome is an important step towards decision making (e.g., Paulus, 2005), individual differences in anger or anxiety predispose respectively to a positive or a negative outcome evaluation (e.g., Fischhoff et al., 2005 and Gu et al., 2010). This kind of codification is a key to adjust the assessment of preferences among possible options of the subsequent decision making. As cited above, trait anger and trait anxiety appear to predispose, respectively, to risky and to avoidant decisions (e.g., Mitte, 2007). However, the impact of individual differences in anger or anxiety-proneness on real life financial decisions has till now been noticeably understudied, even though they are particularly noteworthy: they may be unconscious and unrelated to the decision at hand, nonetheless they can have the potential to influence the perception of financial products and the consequent decisions in important ways. The main purpose of the current study was to evaluate the relationship between anger and anxiety traits and financial behavior, considering real life investment decisions. We conducted an experiment in which participants were confronted with their actual investment choices and their preferences, in the recent past and at present, checking for demographic characteristics (such as age, education, gender, marital status, employment status and income), experience in economic/financial topics and amount of savings. We supposed that trait anger would predict risky decisions, that is investments with high risk and therefore high expected returns. On the other hand, trait anxiety would predict conservative decisions, that is sound investments for savings. In addition, we sought to evaluate the stock trend predictability, that is, how much a person believes the fluctuation in price of an investment to be predictable (e.g., to what extent is the value of a specific share or state bond in the market foreseeable?). In such terms, this factor measures the sense of control regarding the possibility to forecast the variation in trend of stocks. The appraisal-tendency theory ( Lerner & Keltner, 2000) suggests that anger promotes the perception of situations as predictable and under individual control: on this basis, we expected that trait anger would activate a cognitive assessment of high stock trend predictability. On the contrary, given that anxiety is linked to a tendency to avoid potentially threatening decisions (i.e., risky ones), a perception of high uncertainty and low personal control over a situation (e.g. Frijda, 1986), we expected that trait anxiety would activate a perception of low stock trend predictability. Finally, we were interested in risk attitude. In line with the potential goal expected from highly anxious individuals to reduce uncertainty (e.g., Bensi & Giusberti, 2007) and to protect themselves from potential threats (Maner & Schmidt, 2006), we expected that, in hypothetic financial scenarios, anxious individuals would be inclined to immediately sell a stock both if it increases or decreases in value, with the goal to, respectively, be sure to obtain a gain or avoid even more losses. Conversely, on the basis of studies highlighting that anger leads to increased risk taking and optimism (e.g., Lerner and Tiedens, 2006 and Quigley and Tedeschi, 1996), we expected that angry individuals, in hypothetic situations, would be prone to wait before selling both if the value of an investment rises or decreases in an attempt to, respectively, increase even more their gains or recover from a temporary loss situation.

We claim that the results have potential implications for both theories of decision making and for investment companies or banks. Economists have suggested that the best decisions in the financial field are not linked to saving money, but to investing in a diversified portfolio for a medium-long term (e.g., Barber & Odean, 2000). In our study, trait anxious individuals did not risk investing money in low predictable stocks nor in those usually perceived as sound, such as property bonds, industrials or insurance products: trait anxious individuals seem to be over prudent whereas trait anger individuals make “better decisions” as regards economic gains. As our findings suggest, personality traits may shape investment choices and decisions. These data fit with a growing body of evidence suggesting that individual differences in affective experiences influence risk decision-making (e.g., Maner et al., 2007 and Slovic et al., 2004). Our study suggests the utility of a motivation-based approach to decision-making and is consistent with other theories positing emotion-specific influences on judgments and decisions (e.g., Lerner & Keltner, 2000). These findings also have practical implications for advisors or banks interested in identifying people most at risk for taking potentially risky decisions and, in turn, people not disposed to invest their money or to make investment decisions.