Typical characteristics of a long-term financial decisions such as related to retirement planning are that the consequences of decisions taken today only materialize in the distant future, and that the decision environment is complex. We argue that, in this setting, reliance on emotional decision heuristics is highly important. The goal of this article is to enhance the knowledge of emotions within the context of long-term financial decision making. Knowing more about emotions in long-term financial decision-making will ultimately help, for example, to get pension plan participants
more engaged in retirement planning. We first define emotions, distinguish them from feelings and moods, explain the difference between basic and non-basic emotions, and present different classifications of emotions. Since the measurement of emotions is anything but simple, we review and compare the different ways to measure emotions, from studying the brain, observing facial expressions, and studying written texts, to using self-report survey measures. We provide examples of different studies that research the role of emotions in the pension context, and we briefly summarize the key insights from three ongoing research projects on emotions in relation to retirement planning. Writing about retirement results in emotional texts, we find that different emotions are evoked, depending on whether retirement planning is perceived as more aleatory (random) rather than epistemic (knowable) and that, for older age groups, positive emotions are more intense and negative emotions less intense. Furthermore, our results reveal that emotions, especially anxiety, play an important role in retirement planning and have an effect on participants’ behavior. This has implications for policy makers, pension providers, and financial advisors as they should take participants’ emotions into account when communicating about pensions so that negative  sentiments are reduced.