Pushed to Choose: Motivational, Emotional, and Physiological Processes in Police Decision-Making

Police decision-making often unfolds in emotionally charged, uncertain, and time-pressured environments. Officers are required to interpret ambiguous cues, regulate affect, assess risk, and act in ways that are lawful, proportionate, and operationally effective. Yet these decisions are not shaped by cognition alone. Emotional states, chronic occupational stress, fatigue, burnout, trauma exposure, moral strain, and psychological well-being can all influence attention, judgment, impulse control, communication, and post-incident recovery. At the same time, the consequences of police decisions extend beyond individual performance to public trust, procedural justice, use-of-force outcomes, and officers’ long-term mental health. A focused discussion of how emotional processes and well-being interact with police decision-making is therefore timely and necessary, both for psychological theory and for evidence-informed practice.This Research Topic aims to advance a psychologically grounded understanding of decision-making in policing by bringing together work on emotional mechanisms, well-being, and performance under pressure. The collection seeks to move beyond narrow models of rational choice and examine how stress reactivity, emotion regulation, threat perception, cognitive load, fatigue, resilience, burnout, moral injury, and recovery processes shape police judgments and actions. This topic also welcomes studies exploring how training, supervision, organizational climate, leadership, and decision-support tools may protect well-being while improving the quality of decisions. Recent advances in ecological assessment, simulation-based designs, psychophysiology, longitudinal methods, and computational approaches create new opportunities to study police decisions in more realistic and multidimensional ways. This collection aims to integrate these perspectives and stimulate research with both theoretical depth and practical value.Areas of interest include, but are not limited to the following:• Motivational processes underlying police decision-making in operational and everyday contexts• Law enforcement research focused on decision-making across varied operational roles, for example, tactical officers, military police, special force police, and public safety personnel, role-specific training academy environments, and studies employing mixed-group methodologies.• Approach and avoidance motivation in high-pressure, uncertain, or risky situations• The role of goals, incentives, duty, and perceived responsibility in police judgments and choices• Interactions between motivation, stress, emotional states, and cognitive control during decision-making• Individual differences in motivational orientation and their effects on police performance and judgment• Organizational, situational, and cultural factors shaping motivational drivers in policing• Training, intervention, and assessment approaches aimed at improving decision quality through motivational mechanismsThis Research Topic welcomes Original Research, Reviews, Mini Reviews, Methods, Perspectives addressing police decision-making from psychological, applied, forensic, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Submissions may include experimental, observational, longitudinal, simulation-based, and mixed-methods studies, as well as theoretically driven contributions with clear implications for police practice, training, and officer support. Topic editors: Alberto Paramio, Judith P. Andersen Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81824/pushed-to-choose-motivational-emotional-and-physiological-processes-in-police-decision-making