Emotion, decision-making and the brain

Abstract

Initial explorations in the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics have highlighted evidence supporting a potential dissociation between a fast automatic system and a slow deliberative controlled system. Growing research in the role of emotion in decision-making has attempted to draw parallels to the automatic system. This chapter will discuss a theoretical framework for understanding the role of emotion in decision-making and evidence supporting the underlying neural substrates. This chapter applies a conceptual framework to understanding the role of emotion in decision-making, and emphasizes a distinction between expected and immediate emotions. Expected emotions refer to anticipated emotional states associated with a given decision that are never actually experienced. Immediate emotions, however, are experienced at the time of decision, and either can occur in response to a particular decision or merely as a result of a transitory fluctuation. This chapter will review research from the neuroeconomics literature that supports a neural dissociation between these two classes of emotion and also discuss a few interpretive caveats. Several lines of research including regret, uncertainty, social decision-making, and moral decision-making have yielded evidence consistent with our formulization--expected and immediate emotions may invoke dissociable neural systems. This chapter provides a more specific conceptualization of the mediating role of emotions in the decision-making process, which has important implications for understanding the interacting neural systems underlying the interface between emotion and cognition--a topic of immediate value to anyone investigating topics within the context of social-cognitive-affective-neuroscience.