Psychological Characteristics of Decision-Making and Emotion Regulation in Military Personnel Under Extreme Conditions: A Narrative Review and an Integrative Model

Abstract

Background: Military and tactical personnel must make consequential decisions under threat, time pressure and uncertainty, conditions in which stress-related changes in cognition and emotion can degrade performance.

Objective: To synthesise psychological evidence on decision-making and emotion regulation in extreme conditions and to propose an integrative model that can be applied in tactical training.

Methods: A narrative review was conducted in the IMRAD format. Peer-reviewed studies, authoritative monographs and defence-research reports on military, police and other high-stakes populations were coded into three domains: cognitive-decisional effects of stress, emotion-regulation processes, and moderators and interventions.

Results: Acute stress narrows attention, reduces cognitive flexibility, shifts control from deliberative to habitual processing and changes risk preferences. Expert recognition-based decisions remain effective in familiar situations but become vulnerable when cues are atypical. Emotion-regulation strategies differ in cognitive cost and effectiveness, and their value depends on timing and context. Hardiness, resilience and experience moderate stress effects, while graded stress exposure combined with regulation skills and scenario-based decision practice is the most promising training approach. The Appraisal–Regulation–Decision (ARD) model integrates these findings.

Conclusions: Decision quality in extreme situations depends on how well emotional arousal is regulated before it distorts attention and cognition. Training should therefore combine realistic stress exposure, explicit regulation skills and varied decision drills. A quasi-experimental protocol for empirical validation of the ARD model is proposed.