339 Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 2013, 35, 339-357 © 2013 Human Kinetics, Inc. Sylvain Laborde is with UFR STAPS, EA 4260, University of Caen, France, and with the Institute of Psychology, German Sport University, Cologne, Germany. Markus Raab is with the Institute of Psychology, German Sport University, Cologne, Germany, and with the Department of Applied Sciences, London South Bank University, London, UK. The Tale of Hearts and Reason: The Influence of Mood on Decision Making Sylvain Laborde 1,2 and Markus Raab 2,3 1 University of Caen; 2 German Sport University; 3 London South Bank University In decision-making research, one important aspect of real-life decisions has so far been neglected: the mood of the decision maker when generating options. The authors tested the use of the take-the-irst (TTF) heuristic and extended the TTF model to understand how mood inluences the option-generation process of individuals in two studies, the irst using a between-subjects design (30 nonexperts, 30 near-experts, and 30 experts) and the second conceptually replicating the irst using a within-subject design (30 nonexperts). Participants took part in an experimental option-generation task, with 31 three-dimensional videos of choices in team handball. Three moods were elicited: positive, neutral, and negative. The indings (a) replicate previous results concern- ing TTF and (b) show that the option-generation process was associated with the physiological component of mood, supporting the neurovisceral integration model. The extension of TTF to processing emotional factors is an important step forward in explaining fast choices in real-life situations. Keywords: emotion, option generation, heart rate variability, creativity, sport, choice Decision-making research in sports has often conceived of the athlete as a “cold” decision maker, unmoved by “hot” affective processes (e.g., Johnson & Raab, 2003; for an exception, see Laborde, Dosseville, & Raab, 2013). Yet athletes experience affective states in training and sports competition (e.g., Martinent, Campo, & Ferrand, 2012), making them a crucial component of performance, at both the psychological and the physical level (Woodman et al., 2009). We sought to test the effects of affective states on the decision process. Affective states is a broad term that encompasses several types of affec- tive phenomena, such as mood and emotions (Scherer, 2005). Here we are concerned only with mood. We tested decisions made in different mood states that relect the overall affective state of the individual decision maker (Scherer, 2005). Individual decision making is often described in terms of a inal choice and analyzed by presenting a ixed set of options, ignoring how options are generated in the environment or retrieved from memory (Raab, de Oliveira, & Heinen, 2009). Yet in real life, options often need to be dynamically encountered or generated (Johnson & Raab, 2003). Option-generation processes have been studied in sports to understand better how an athlete decides (e.g., Johnson & Raab, 2003). Such decisions and the option generation that precedes them have been modeled in recent decades (Johnson & Raab, 2003; Ward, Suss, Eccles, Williams, & Harris, 2011). Some option-generation approaches assume that a high number of generated options is not detrimental to perfor- mance (e.g., Ward et al., 2011); the take-the-irst (TTF) heuristic (Johnson & Raab, 2003), in contrast, assumes a less-is-more effect: Fewer options generated results in better choices, at least for experts. Experts make decisions by relying on their mental capacities and the characteristics of the speciic decision environment (Todd & Gigerenzer, 2012). For instance, when time pressure is not a main characteristic of the task, as in chess, experts have been found to prefer deliberative strategies, searching for and relying on a large amount of information (Bilali´ c, McLeod, & Gobet, 2009; Campitelli & Gobet, 2004; Moxley, Anders Ericsson, Charness, & Krampe, 2012). In contrast, when time pressure becomes a dominant characteristic of the task, as in sports, experts use mainly relevant information and rely on heuristics (Raab, 2012). They tend to use simpler rules, such as TTF, that relect intuitive choices (Raab & Laborde, 2011). Experts have a higher quality of irst and overall options compared with near-experts or novices (Raab & Johnson, 2007). Dynamic inconsistency, the number of trials in which the irst and the best choice are not identical, has been found to be lower in experts (Raab & Johnson, 2007), as have decision time (i.e., the time taken to generate the initial option) and generation time of all options (Raab & Johnson, 2007). Experts’ gaze JOURNAL OF SPORT EXERCISE PSYCHOLOGY Official Journal of NASPSPA www.JSEP-Journal.com ORIGINAL RESEARCH