Essay on Emotions And Decision Making

. These personality changes in these patients are similar to the changes found in psychopaths. Antoni Damasio and his teams highlights this similarity as they were able to show a 16 percent reduction in the volume of the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Raine, 148-149). This structurel impairment to the ventral region of the prefrontal cortex is particularly implicated in antisocial, psychopathic behavior (Raine pg 148-149]). Antonio Damasio was also able to associate this deformation in the ventral prefrontal cortex with an array of deficits in emotion and decision making, lack of guilt, shame and empathy, poor planning, irresponsibility, and irritability. Experimental studies were able to reveal that both neurological damaged patients and psychopaths exhibited reduced emotional charged stimuli, defects in economic decision-making skills, deficits in reversal learning and moral judgment impairment (Koenigs, 2012). Blair’s research also supports these findings as he was able to prove his argument that the integrated functioning of the vmPFC enables the basics of care-based morality and dysfunction within the region in psychopathy means that reinforcement-based decision making, including moral and economic decision making, are impaired

67) The frontal lobes are described as the brain’s “orchestra leader” (Martin, 1998, p. 190), which would place them at the reins of controlling effective behaviour. Damage to the frontal lobes encompasses a wide range of symptoms including deficits in executive functioning, changes in personality, emotional expression and social interaction. This includes apathy and lack of spontaneity, inability to plan and modify the sequencing of behaviour and inappropriate behaviour. 2

This paper will examine Robert C. Solomon's Emotions and Choices article, to best identify what anger is, and to what extent a rational human being is responsible for their anger. Firstly, Solomon's argument must be described. A quick summation of Solomon's argument can be found in the following four points: Emotions are judgements, emotions are chosen, emotions serve a purpose, and emotions are rational.1 To quote Solomon, he explains that “Emotions are not occurrences, and do not happen to us. They ... may be chosen like an action.”2

The amygdala of psychopaths have has been found to be hypoactive during fear conditioning (Birbaumer et al., 2005), moral decision-making (Glenn, Raine, & Schug, 2009), and social cooperation (Rilling et al., 2007). As expected, studies have also found the amygdala to be hypoactive in response to fearful faces or other affect-related activity (e.g. Carré et al., 2013; Kiehl et al., 2001). Nevertheless, Müller et al. (2003) found that psychopaths had increased activation in the amygdala (in addition to increased prefrontal activation) when viewing negative content (e.g. pictures of threatening animals, wounded people) which they interpreted as reflecting abnormal prefrontal – amygdala communication.” (Umbach et al., 2015,

The most common traits associated with antisocial personality disorder are general cognitive and emotional dysfunction, especially in regards to callousness, manipulation and shallow affect. This study examined specific brain functioning tendencies of both mentally healthy participants and patients diagnosed with psychopathy by comparatively analyzing their facial emotion processing. The comparison allowed researchers to determine the relationship between psychopathological tendencies in relevance to patterns of responses. Generally, people diagnosed with psychopathy demonstrate reduced autonomic responses to expressions of distress or sadness, which in turn leads

Recent research has shown that the human brain continues to develop throughout childhood and adolescence, and may not be fully mature until the mid-20s. The prefrontal cortex of the brain, which regulates “executive” functioning skills, such as decision-making, planning, judgment, expression of emotions, and impulse control, is one of the last to

Studying parts of the brain that are involved in dealing with fear and stress also helps researchers understand possible causes of PTSD to begin formulating a plan to treat PTSD. The amygdala is known for its role in emotion, learning, and memory. The amygdala appears active in learning to fear an event as well as in the early stages of fear extinction. In storing extinction memories and dampening an existing fear the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in problem solving, decision making, and judgement, is seemingly

Furthering the studies of psychopathy, there are two main theories that have been used to explain this abnormalities in the brain. The first theory is called the Somatic Marker Hypothesis of Damasio (1994) which proposed that damage to the prefrontal cortex in the brain causes poor decision making abilities which shows a lack of potential development for the somatic aspects that are linked to the excitement of rewards and/or punishment. This leads to an inconsiderate attitude towards any negative consequences as well as social rules or outcomes. This theory is supported by its neurobiological equivalent which is the orbitofrontal and medial frontal cortex in the brain which is responsible for decision making and other cognitive processes. Neuropsychological evidence proves that the Somatic

Our emotions in many cases affect our perception of events as well as the actions that we take ourselves by permeating our way of thinking, and therefore affecting each thing that we do in that moment. In particular, emotions about the perception of ourselves have been shown to have both the ability to positively and negatively affect our actions and performances in life. This is what can be

Emotions are used in everyday life, whether it be just a simple smile that makes happiness disperse in your brain, or a death of a loved one that causes sadness. The basic emotions are joy, interest, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame, and guilt. The way we see emotion in ourselves and others can be very complex because we sometimes assume they feel a certain way just based on their actions or even facial expressions. When emotion is discussed in psychological terms, it is not based on one thing, instead it’s a mix of bodily arousal, expressive behaviors, conscious experience. Many theories try to explain how emotion works.

The frontal lobe is about reasoning, planning, speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving. The frontal lobe will assess the driver to respond to

As educated people, we often try to ignore the influence of emotions on decision-making. Neuroscience evidence now shows that sound and rational decision making is contingent on prior accurate emotional processing. The basis for this is the somatic marker hypothesis. The somatic marker hypothesis provides a systems level neuroanatomical and cognitive framework for decision-making, the impact, and influence on it by emotions. The key idea of this hypothesis is that decision-making is a process that is influenced by marker signals that arise in bio regulatory processes, which includes those that express themselves in emotions and feelings. This influence can occur at multiple levels of operation, some of which occur consciously and some of which occur non-consciously (Bechara & Damasio, 2000).

Decision making can be described as a process of making a decision or decisions, based on choices made amongst two or more competing course of actions. The ‘Decision making’ also requires making a define choice between two or more alternatives course of actions that are available.

Chapter 3 explores the concept of universally shared basic emotions, an idea that was first advanced as a theory by Charles Darwin. Paul Ekman and Jakk Panksepp studied the concept of

For many people, they live their lives based on emotions. Emotions of happiness, love, success, and many more, could possibly be the most satisfying feelings. Except we commonly experience unpleasant emotions. There are emotions of anger, hatred, sadness, and disgrace. A very important question in the understanding of the human mind and highly related to cognitive science, is how do these emotions affect human cognition and the impact on our abilities to be rational? To tackle this question, we need to understand what emotions are, but not solely in the manner we are all familiar with, we need to understand them from a cognitive nature involving our physiology, psychology, and environment. Cognition, according to the Oxford definition