Abstract
Twenty-three years ago, the Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH) proposed by Damasio was introduced to explain the role of emotion in decision-making, and provided a unique neuroanatomical framework for decision-making and its influence by emotion. The core idea of the SMH is that decision-making is a process that is affected by somatic state signals, including those that express themselves in emotion and feeling. In order to verify the SMH, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) was originally designed by Bechara et al. and the skin conductance responses (SCRs) was recorded during the IGT. The initial confirmatory results showed that normal subjects would generate anticipatory SCRs when they received reward or punishment, but patients of the VMPFC lesion entirely failed to generate anticipatory SCRs prior to their selection of a card. With the further development of the SMH–related researches, other electrophysiological methods of measuring somatic state was gradually used to test the SMH, including event-related potentials (ERPs), and heart rate (HR). In this mini review article, we summarize the extant electrophysiological research on the SMH and decision-making under ambiguity, propose an integrative perspective for employing different electrophysiological measurement methods, and indicate the application of electrophysiological measurement based on the SMH in daily social decision-making.
Highlights
Emotion is considered a destructive factor in the cognitive process for a long time (Reimann and Bechara, 2010)
The results show that the performance of healthy participants in Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is closely related to aSCR
Measurement of skin conductance responses (SCRs) and event-related potentials (ERPs) can obtain a complete somatic signals on the time course. as mentioned earlier, heart rate (HR) is regulated by the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, while SCRs reflect the response of the sympathetic nervous system (Mark et al, 1985; Hampton et al, 2007)
Summary
Emotion is considered a destructive factor in the cognitive process for a long time (Reimann and Bechara, 2010). Healthy participants must undergo a long process of exploration and step-by-step learning during the IGT (Bechara et al, 1996; Chiu et al, 2008) In this process, somatic markers generated by emotional components help to predict long-term positive or negative outcomes, especially before conceptualized explicit knowledge has been developed. VMPFC and OFC are believed to be the core brain regions of the SMH, which can integrate emotional-related somatic signals from the periphery to the central nervous system to regulate and monitor cognitive processes of decision-making (Damasio, 1994, 1996). SCRs, EEG and ECG can quantify the emotional and feeling responses related to decision-making, which help to reveal the relationship between emotion-related somatic signals and decision-making, and is the most extensive physiological indicator for studying on SMH and ambiguity decision.
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