Positive Valence Functions as a Common Currency for Affective Decision-Making

When people are faced with a choice between experiencing two different kinds of positive emotions, it is unclear whether they evaluate them along a single shared dimension of positivity, or alternatively, whether they rely on multiple emotion-specific dimensions of positivity to make their decisions. To investigate this, we examined how positive valence (i.e., the degree to which an experience is considered pleasant or positive) influences preference-based decisions between distinct positive emotional experiences elicited by short video clips. Across two studies (N = 220 and N = 388; university students), Brier Skill Scores showed that decisions were best explained by a model that treated positive valence as uniform across emotions (Study 1), and logistic regression showed that positive valence outperformed emotion-specific preferences in accounting for choice behaviour (Study 2). Together, these findings suggest that positive valence functions as a common evaluative currency for preference-based decisions between positive emotional experiences.