Emotions and risk perception

The role of emotions in risk perception has been held to be important, based mainly on findings in applications of the Psychometric Model and the notion of an “Affect heuristic”. These conclusions are criticized on the grounds that the work on “Dread” in the tradition of the Psychometric Model has been based not on emotion items but mainly on items measuring severity of consequences. Furthermore, “affect” is a word denoting emotions but in the concrete applications to the “affect heuristic” studies have been made not of emotions, but of attitudes and evaluations. In the present paper, actual data on emotions are investigated and it is found that emotions do indeed play an important role in risk perception and related attitudes. In one study it was found that interest in a hazard (a positive emotion) was positively correlated with perceived risk. Interest was an important explanatory factor in models of demand for risk mitigation. The results are correlational and experimental studies are needed to draw more certain conclusions about the causal role of emotions. Much recent work on emotions and attitudes suggests a 3-step process, where initial cognitive processing gives rise to emotions, which in turn guide the further, more elaborate, cognitive processing. The notion of the primacy of a primitive initial emotional reaction governing belief contents is rejected. Risk communication based on such a simplistic neurophysiological model is likely to fail.