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Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate how the emotion expressed by a fictitious proposer influences the responder’s decision to accept or reject a severely unfair deal, represented by the splitting of a predetermined sum of money between the two players during an ultimatum game (UG). Rejection leads both parts to dissipate that sum. Critically the authors consider the situation in which both players have the best alternative to negotiation agreement (BATNA), which simulates a backup plan to rely on in case of no agreement. Design/methodology/approach The participants played a UG and, to foster the ecological validity of the paradigm, the parts could both rely on a more or less generous BATNA. The critical manipulation was the emotion expressed by the proposer while their BATNA was either hidden (Exp. 1) or communicated (Exp. 2). Findings The proposer’s emotions influenced participants’ own emotions, affected their social evaluations about the proposer, the desire for future interactions with the proposer and were used to infer the proposer’s BATNA when it was unknown. In this latter case, proposers’ emotions and in particular his/her happiness, decreased dramatically the participants’ tendency to reject even severely unfair offers. Originality/value Past research on UG has been predominantly aimed to investigate the effect of responders’ emotions or the effects of responders’ emotions on the proposer, devoting little attention to how the critical responder’s acceptance/rejection decision might be affected by the proposer’s emotion. Especially in the ecological situation where the parts have a BATNA in case of non-agreement.

Bronfenbrenner's ecological perspective has been adopted by feminist psychological counseling in order to promote the psychosocial empowerment of women. e basis of this perspective is Carolyn Zerbe Enns and Elizabeth Nutt Williams, e Oxford Handbook of Feminist Counseling Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2012). e intersection of the "ecological systems theory" and feminist perspective considers that human development re ects the in uence of several environmental systems. is model identi es ve environmental systems with which an individual interacts: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem. Each system contains roles, norms, and rules that may shape psychological development. e counseling derived from this viewpoint, applied to the eld of domestic violence, does not consider the woman victim of violence as mentally ill but as a victim of a multi-systemic pathology that she must become conscious of in order to defend herself.

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