## 4 Discussion
The above-described results match the results for the 25% prior investment condition, but they look different for the 0% prior investment condition. In the 0% condition, \"stable\" scenarios elicited the most potentiated startle responses when compared to both of the other scenarios. The \"stable\" scenario can be understood as reflecting the most ambiguous situation and thus leading to the most aversive affection, because of uncertainty, as one might think. However, this aversion only occurred during the condition of 0% prior investment. At first, one might think that 0% prior investment results in sell decisions making no sense, simply because there is nothing to sell. A second thought, however, might shine some light on this interesting finding. In fact, selling an asset that did not yet require any monetary investment actually does make sense in the context of so called short selling [38]. Short selling makes up 30% of total trading in the US [39; 40]. This quite unique form of trading could explain the finding that the \"stable\" scenario, in particular, elicited the most strongly aversive response due to its ambiguous nature, which might become more problematic in the context of short selling. Short selling basically means to not own, but only borrow an asset, which is why no immediate investment is necessary. Potential profit depends on whether a short seller can buy back the asset at a lower price anytime later, which requires unusual information gathering [41; 42; 43] if one does not want to simply rely on current economic situations [44; 45]. This situation could lead to higher aversion levels related to uncertain price scenarios like in the experimental \"stable\" condition. Long ago, scholars indicated that short selling makes sense if one believes that the future perspective of an asset value is a decline [46; 47]. In other words, short selling only makes sense if one believes an asset is currently overvalued [41]. At this stage, it is difficult to find any further explanations for why the \"stable\" condition elicits strongest aversion only in the case of 0% prior investment and why both the \"gain\" and \"crash\" scenario do not show any such phenomena depending on the percent of prior investment. It seems as if the ambiguous nature of the \"stable\" condition leads to more possible affective variations depending on different circumstances. Similar results were found for so-called neutral emotion stimuli that can also be perceived as ambiguous. Two recent electroencephalography (EEG) studies revealed that only neutral emotion pictures elicit varying frontal brain activities depending on another person being present versus being alone when being exposed to positive, negative and neutral pictures [48]. The authors interpreted this finding as being a result of the ambiguous nature of neutral stimuli that, while someone else is present, lead to the desire to ask for input from that person. Finally, the further factor of asset manager experience was introduced. Descriptive results show that the overall pattern found across both factors is only seen in the low experience group, while the results for the experienced group resemble the ones found for the 0% prior investment condition. In the experienced group, the stable scenario elicited the most negative non-conscious affective response (i.e., the highest level of aversion), which could correlate with the idea of short selling, which is indeed a unique strategy. In addition, a recent study on working memory (WM) load and SRM [18] found evidence for potentiated eye blink amplitudes in case of pleasant and neutral picture stimuli under WM load conditions (under high WM load even more than under low WM load). Since the no experience group in our study showed larger eye blink amplitudes (in general) compared to the experience group, one might conclude that differences in mental workload with respect to experience versus no experience are potentially reflected in our SRM data.