CeDEx Seminar - Luke Lindsay (University of Exeter)

Emotions in asset markets: evidence from skin conductance, heart rates, and facial expressions

This paper studies relationships between market events, trader's emotions, and trading behavior. A set of 16 experimental asset markets were run using a variant of the structure introduced by Smith, Suchanek, and Williams (1988). Like Breaban and Noussair (2018), videos of traders' facial expressions were recorded. The videos were analyzed using face reading software to infer emotions, e.g. joy, anger, fear, sadness.  As well as this, traders' heart rates and skin conductance were recorded using sensors. The data from the sensors were used to construct measures of emotional arousal. The data on emotions are then linked with data on market activity to enable an exploratory analysis of the interplay between market experience, emotions, and market behavior.