# Socio-Economic Decision Making and Emotion Elicitation with a Serious Game in the Wild
## 1 Introduction  
Emotions are essential factors that influence our decision-making processes and affect our daily lives, including our behavior, clothing choices, dietary habits, and investment decisions [1; 2; 3; 4]. It is known that both incidental and integral emotions are critical in establishing our default preferences when making decisions in our everyday lives [5; 6; 7; 8; 9]. The incidental emotional state, also known as mood, reflects the general state of our minds and is not dependant on conscious decisions or judgments made by ourselves at any given instant [9]. The integral emotional state is the emotional state of a person when a decision is being made [9]. Currently, automatic emotion detection (for both incidental and integral emotions) is being used in several avenues for mitigating the damaging effects of mental illnesses and neurological conditions, i.e., for teaching social interaction to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) using robotics [10], for using emotion recognition as a tool for detecting depression [11], for promoting positive emotions [12], and so on. The advancements and miniaturisation of modern technology means that these automatic emotion detection methods now have unprecedented accuracy and portability [13; 14]. Applications of automatic emotion detection have been possible due to the existence of certain patterns in emotional responses, most notably, of individuals with social anxiety [15], depression [11], borderline personality disorder [16; 17; 18] and post-traumatic stress disorder [19]. Moreover, gamified activities have shown to produce specific emotional responses both in individuals with affective disorders [20; 21; 22] as well as mentally healthy individuals under socio-economic scenarios [23; 24; 25]. Similarly, decision making patterns from individuals with and without affective disorders under socio-economic scenarios have been reported in literature (e.g., [20; 22; 25; 26; 27; 28; 29]). When making a decision in a socio-economic scenario, the incidental emotional state of a person influences the decision one will make and this, in turn, gives rise to the integral emotional state of the person [9]. In the case of sequential decision making tasks, the integral emotion of the first task becomes the incidental emotion to the subsequent task and hence, each decision made by an individual has an impact on the subsequent decisions in the sequence through the changes in the emotional states of the individual [9; 30; 31]. Hence, studying decision-making patterns over a sequence of socio-economic tasks can be useful in understanding whether the elicited emotional responses conform with the ones observed in the literature. This would help in detecting affective disorders such as depression and anxiety [32; 33], especially for ASD individuals with communication disabilities [34] and for acceptance testing [35]. On a different note, studies investigating the affective state of participants in experiments under controlled settings often tend to induce some level of anxiety [36; 37; 38]. The factors that are often controlled in such experiments include elimination of external stimuli in a laboratory setup to minimise distractions; controlling environmental factors such as humidity, air temperature, quality of air to minimise participant discomfort are controlled; and having experimenters who have properly planned set of activities to minimise uncertainties. Such setups are often foreign to the participants, and may induce stress. These drawbacks are usually not encountered in experiments that are setup 'in the wild', which is a general term indicating that data is collected in uncontrolled settings, not in a laboratory and typically using devices owned by consumers [39]. More specifically, emotions elicited in the wild have an inherent advantage of situated perspective [40], which is particularly important in socio-economic contexts [41]. Essentially, situated perspective refers to the consideration of emotional responses of people in the context of their environments.