| The role of emotion in decision making: A cognitive neuroscience perspective (2006) | |||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||
| ABSTRACT—Decision making often occurs in the face of uncertainty about whether one’s choices will lead to benefit or harm. The somatic-marker hypothesis is a neurobiological theory of how decisions are made in the face of uncertain outcome. This theory holds that such decisions are aided by emotions, in the form of bodily states, that are elicited during the deliberation of future consequences and that mark different options for behavior as being advantageous or disadvantageous. This process involves an interplay between neural systems that elicit emotional/ bodily states and neural systems that map these emotional/ bodily states. KEYWORDS—decision making; frontal lobes; neuropsychology; neuroeconomics; emotion Decision making precedes many of life’s most important events: choosing whom to marry, which house to buy, which stock to invest in, whether to have just one more drink before hitting the road, whether to have surgery, and whether to quit smoking, to name a few examples. Properly executed decision making gives rise to some of the most elevated human abilities, such as ethics, politics, and financial reasoning. Derangements of decision making underlie some of the more tragic consequences of psychiatric illnesses such as drug addiction, eating disorders, obsessivecompulsive disorder, schizophrenia, mania, and personality disorders (Rahman, Sahakian, Cardinal, Rogers, & Robbins, 2001). The field of economics, which is concerned with formalizing the rules that govern human decision making, has begun to focus increasingly on forms of decision making that go beyond simple cost–benefit analysis. Traditional economic theory assumed that | |||||||||||||||
Publication details | |||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||