Emotion-driven switching game environments facilitates general cooperation

Emotion is a fundamental driving force of individual behavior, decision-making, and social interactions. It determines our relations toward more and less successful partners, but it can also affects how we evaluate a specific relation with others. In particular, we tend to participate in high-value games with recognized persons and prefer low-value games with less reliable participants. To reveal the comprehensive consequences of individual emotions, we propose an extended model in which a “ternary interaction” among emotions, behaviors, and selected game environments determine the coevolutionary process in a social dilemma. Importantly, the proposed dynamical rule allows players to switch their game environment based on emotional indicators. Our results indicate that emotion-driven switching between the game environments can surprisingly promote cooperation even in the cases when neither high-value game environment nor low-value game environment is unable to do it. The key mechanism here is a nonlinear “feedback loop” among positive emotions, cooperative behavior, and a high-value game – characterized by threshold-dependent activation of emotional recognition and cluster-based cooperative amplification – which enables the formation of cooperative clusters. This nonlinear dynamics leads to a phase transition in emotional phenotypes, where “open-minded and kind people” gain evolutionary advantage beyond linear behavioral or environmental switching mechanisms. Our observations are broadly valid in spatial communities. Compared to random and scale-free interaction networks, regular networks are more conducive to the clustering of the mentioned individuals and have a lower threshold for achieving cooperation preference.