The Effect of a Pseudo Winning or Losing Streak on Mental Attitudes and the Evaluation of Results

Abstract

Although human motivation has been well studied, studies manipulating human motivation are scarce. The present study aimed to induce the hot-hand phenomenon using a pseudo success situation. Under the framework of the two-factor theory of emotion, we investigated the effect of a deviant situation, such as continuously winning or losing, on mental attitudes and the evaluation of the results using the contingent-negative variation (CNV) and feedback-locked P3 (FB-P3). The CNV is a neural activity that reflects emotional expectations and motoric preparation. The FB-P3 is a neural activity that is induced by external feedback. Fifteen participants performed an S1-S2 reaction time task with an opponent in the following three competitive conditions: actual feedback (feedback is contingent on performance), winning streak (WS; tendency to win regardless of performance), and losing streak (LS; tendency to lose regardless of performance). Each condition was characterized by the winning rate (49.26%, 80%, and 20%). Moreover, a principal component analysis was performed on the CNV data to determine the distinct temporal neural activity. The principal component analysis identified three components (auditory P2, early CNV, and late CNV) in the original CNV. The auditory P2 and the occurrence of pleasant emotions were higher in the WS condition than in the LS condition. However, the early CNV, late CNV, and FB-P3 were higher in the LS condition than in the WS condition. These findings confirmed that the losing streak situation induced an unpleasant emotion. However, the losing streak situation appeared to improve the mental attitude to prepare for faster responses and enhance the interest in the results.

“You Win, You Buy”—How Continuous Win Effect Influence Consumers' Price Perception: An ERP Study

“…Standard ERP recording methods indicated that P2 component was sensitive to the onset of pleasant-going arousal-related amplitude modulation persisting until stimulus offset (Carretié et al, 2001a , b ; Amrhein et al, 2004 ; Olofsson and Polich, 2007 ; Olofsson et al, 2008 ). Kamei et al ( 2018 ) also observed that the auditory P2 and the occurrence of pleasant emotions were higher in the winning streak (WS) condition than in the losing streak (LS) condition (Kamei et al, 2018 ). Similar to Kamei et al ( 2018 ), a larger P2 peak-amplitude from 150 to 220 ms was observed in CWHP compared with CLHP condition, might because CW elicited more positive emotions than CL and this emotion state was lasting then continuously influenced subjects' price perception resulting higher adding ratio of CWHP than CLHP (see Figures 4 , 6 ).…”

“…Kamei et al ( 2018 ) also observed that the auditory P2 and the occurrence of pleasant emotions were higher in the winning streak (WS) condition than in the losing streak (LS) condition (Kamei et al, 2018 ). Similar to Kamei et al ( 2018 ), a larger P2 peak-amplitude from 150 to 220 ms was observed in CWHP compared with CLHP condition, might because CW elicited more positive emotions than CL and this emotion state was lasting then continuously influenced subjects' price perception resulting higher adding ratio of CWHP than CLHP (see Figures 4 , 6 ). In addition, larger LPP amplitudes had been observed in CWHP compared to CLHP either (see Figure 7 ).…”

“…Emotion-related researches normally adopted affective pictures or emotional words as the priming stimuli (Begleiter et al, 1967 ; Sweeny et al, 2009 ; Axelrod et al, 2015 ; Diéguez-Risco et al, 2015 ; Zhang et al, 2015 ; Chanes et al, 2018 ). Existing research findings expounded that winning or losing might induce positive or negative emotions in sports games or gambling (Lole et al, 2013 ; Doron and Gaudreau, 2014 ; Tomer et al, 2014 ; Sacré et al, 2016 ; Kamei et al, 2018 ), yet few studies adopted it as an emotional priming and integrated it to investigate with other topics especially business or marketing issues. To our best knowledge, we firstly employed a two-player FP game as an emotional priming paradigm and integrated it into a price perception investigation.…”