In this video I discuss why we have emotions and how they play a role in our assessments of good and bad, our decision-making, and even our perception. I describe the hedonic principle, Antonio Damasio‘s patient Elliot, and the rare condition of Capgras Delusion.
Descartes’ Error – Antonio Damasio (Amazon): http://amzn.to/2AchksH
The Tell-Tale Brain – V.S. Ramachandran (Amazon): http://amzn.to/2kX7zvE
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is a Psych Exam Review. In the previous videos we’ve been looking at emotion in detail, but we’ve skipped over a fairly basic question and that question is “why do we have emotions?”. What’s the purpose of emotional experiences?
And you might recall in the first video in this unit I talked about multidimensional scaling and this was the idea that we could compare emotions to one another and map them out based on their level of physiological arousal and their valence, which referred to whether they were positive or negative experiences. And so I want to return to this idea of valence here and think about emotions rather simplistically as good or bad. So we can say that things feel good or they feel bad and that’s a very basic level emotional assessment.
So this brings us to consider what’s called the hedonic principle. The hedonic principle refers to the idea that we are motivated to experience pleasure and avoid pain. So we want things that feel good and we don’t want things that feel bad. And of course this is a great oversimplification and this isn’t the only principle guiding our behavior. Of course we can do things that are not pleasurable now for some future reward. We can make sacrifices but in general we can say that we can tell about whether things are good based on how they feel. So how do I know what is good? What feels good what gives me positive emotions and so in that way it helps to guide my behavior to have these simplistic emotional assessments of things.
Now you might think that these emotional assessments are going to get in the way of your decision-making. I say “well, I could be overly tempted by something that feels good even if it’s rationally not a good decision”. And so you might want to eliminate emotional assessment from your decision making. You might think that “if I could just eliminate my emotional reactions to things then I could act purely rationally”. So let’s look at a case study of somebody who didn’t have these emotional responses to things.
So this brings us to a book called “Descartes‘ Error” by Antonio Damasio and Damasio talked about a patient of his named Elliott. And Elliott suffered from brain damage and as a result his emotional responses were blunted. He didn’t have emotional reactions to things. Now you might think that this would mean that Elliott would behave purely rationally, right? Here would be a guy with no emotion clouding his judgment. But it turns out that Elliot had trouble making decisions. He was unable to make even the most mundane of decisions. So he would engage in this endless consideration of pros and cons. An example that Damasio describes is if you asked Elliot something like “would you like to meet next Tuesday or next Thursday?” he would sit for you know half an hour trying to figure out which is the right choice. “Well, you know, if I meet on Tuesday then I can’t have lunch with my friend who’s going to be visiting from out of town. But, well, if I meet on Thursday then I’m going to have to change some other part of my schedule then.”
You know, he didn’t have a way to judge which of those effects was better or worse and so without the emotional responses, without the feeling that we take for granted when we make a decision like this. Somebody says “you want to meet on Tuesday or Thursday?” and you see that Tuesday just kind of feels right and you sort of go with it. You don’t sit down for an hour and make a list of all of the possible effects of meeting on Tuesday and all of the possible effects of meeting on Thursday. Instead you use this sort of emotional heuristic. You just go with which one feels right. But Elliot never had that feeling no matter how much he worked on his list of pros and cons. He never got to the point where he said “ok, Thursday feels like the right choice” and so he could just continue endlessly deliberating. And so this brings us to a idea that even in this sort of simplistic decision-making of something fairly mundane, emotional responses are important. They help to guide our behavior.
Now we can also see this in a rare condition called Capgras Syndrome or Capgras Delusion and in this delusion what happens is a person believes that a loved one has been replaced by an impostor. So there let’s say they’ve had some sort of brain damage, they’re in the hospital and their mother comes to visit them. And they say you know “this person looks exactly like my mother but she’s not my mother, she’s an imposter. She’s somebody who’s pretending to be my mother”. And you know, “but she looks exactly like her” and so this is interesting because they they recognize their mother obviously but they have this feeling that it’s not really the mother.
And so William Hirstein and Vilyanur Ramachandran proposed that what was happening in this Capgras syndrome was that the person’s perception was intact; their ability to recognize their mother was working just fine, you know? So all of the aspects of perception involved in, you know, seeing their mother’s face and recognizing it and knowing who it was, knowing the relationship, all of that was working just fine. But the damage that they had was affecting their emotional response system. So somewhere in the system involving the emotional response to their mother, something wasn’t functioning properly. And so the idea is when you look at your mother, you don’t just recognize her on a perceptual level, you also have an emotional response to that perception. In these patients what’s happening is they’re seeing this person, they’re recognizing the face, but they don’t have the emotional response. They don’t have that feeling that goes along with seeing your mother, and as a result they feel like “well, it looks just like my mother but I don’t have that, I’m not having this emotional response, and so that means it must not really be my mother. If it were truly my mother then I would have an emotional reaction, but I’m not having it, you know, my emotions are kind of flat and that means it must be an impostor. It must not really be my mother.”
And so this again demonstrates the importance of feelings. So we see that they play a role even in our mundane decision-making but they also play a role in our perception and our determining what to make of the world around us. Things like recognizing your mother have these processes, have emotional components as well, that we often take for granted and we forget are there underneath the surface. It’s only when we see damage to these areas like we see in this Capgras delusion that this can become more evident. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
