THE EFFECTS OF HAPPY, ANGER, SAD, FEAR, AND DISGUST ON TRUST

Abstract

In this paper, a series of studies were conducted to investigate the influence of individuals' five basic emotions (happy, anger, sad, fear, and disgust) on their trust perceptions in strangers. Firstly, lab experiments were conducted on a sample of 277 undergraduates. After quantitative analyses, it was found that while happy did not cause participants to be more trusting of strangers, the other negative emotions caused participants to be less trusting of strangers, with disgust causing the greatest negative impact, followed by sad, anger, and then fear. As the trust perceptions observed in participants from the happy and control conditions were highly similar, a qualitative study was conducted on the data of the experiments. Based on findings from the qualitative study, a second set of lab experiments was conducted on a sample of 43 undergraduates to collect data to form a new control group, using a different experimental design, to replace the control group of the previous experiments. A second round of quantitative analyses was then conducted, and similar conclusions as per the first round of quantitative analyses were reached.