Emotions and Clinical Decision-Making

Clinical decisions often take place in high stakes, emotionally charged environments. While emotions have been increasingly recognized as important within various aspects of healthcare, research on the influence and interactions of emotions on clinical decision-making and reasoning is comparatively scarce. Cognitive psychologists have long recognized that emotions influence a variety of cognitive processes, such as attention, memory, judgment, decision-making, and reasoning, all of which are actively involved in clinical diagnoses. The goal of this chapter is to review evidence from cognitive psychology documenting the relationship between emotion and cognition, situating the findings within the context of clinical reasoning and decision-making. First, the chapter will describe some of the theoretical frameworks used to explain the interplay between emotions and cognition. Next, the chapter summarizes relevant cognitive psychology research on how emotions influence what we pay attention to, what we remember, and how we make decisions and reason about the world around us. The chapter concludes with a description of recent research examining the influence of emotional states and emotional content on healthcare professionals’ clinical reasoning and decision-making.