Emotional states and self-confidence independently fluctuate at different time scales

Abstract

Emotional states are an important ingredient of decision-making. Human beings are immersed into a sea of emotions where episodes of high mood alternate with episodes of low mood. While changes in mood are well characterized, little is known about how these fluctuations interact with metacognition, and in particular with our perception of having made the right choice. Here, we evaluate how implicit measurements of confidence are related with the emotional states of human participants through two online longitudinal experiments involving mood self-reports and visual discrimination decision-making tasks. Self-confidence was assessed on each session by monitoring the proportion of opt-out trials when an opt-out option was available, as well as the mean reaction times on standard correct trials. We first report a strong coupling between the mood, stress, food enjoyment and quality of sleep reported by participants in the same session. Second, we confirmed that the proportion of opt-out responses as well as reaction times in non-opt-out trials provided reliable indices of self-confidence in each session. We introduce a normative measure of overconfidence based on the pattern of opt-out selection and the signal-detection-theory framework. Finally and crucially, we found that mood, sleep quality, food enjoyment and stress level are not coupled with self-confidence, but rather they fluctuate at different time scales: emotional states expose faster fluctuations (over one day or half-a-day) than self-confidence level (two-and-a-half days). Therefore, our findings suggest that emotional states and confidence in decision making spontaneously fluctuate in an independent manner in the healthy adult population.