Neuroscience of Emotion, Cognition, and Decision Making: A Review
Main Article Content
Abstract
The traditional idea of emotion and cognition in Western culture is that emotion is separate from, and inferior to, cognition. This article reviews results from experimental neuroscience that refute this notion and support the idea that emotion and cognition are partners that depend on each other for organized decision making. Cooperation between cortical and subcortical parts of the brain is essential for behavior that adapts successfully to the environment in pursuit of goals. Concurrently, there has been a rich development of computational neural network theories that combine emotion as a source of values with reason as a process of discerning the actions that will best implement those values. Incorporating the partnership view of emotion and cognition encourages integration of those two aspects of the psyche, with benefit both for mental illness treatment and for making society more cooperative.
Article Details
How to Cite
LEVINE, Daniel S..
Neuroscience of Emotion, Cognition, and Decision Making: A Review.
Medical Research Archives, [S.l.], v. 10, n. 7, july 2022.
ISSN 2375-1924.
Available at: <https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/2869>. Date accessed: 19 dec. 2024.
doi: https://doi.org/10.18103/mra.v10i7.2869.
Section
Review Articles
The Medical Research Archives grants authors the right to publish and reproduce the unrevised contribution in whole or in part at any time and in any form for any scholarly non-commercial purpose with the condition that all publications of the contribution include a full citation to the journal as published by the Medical Research Archives.
References
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33. Fan Y, Duncana NW, de Grecke M, Northoff G. Is there a core neural network in empathy? An fMRI based quantitative meta-analysis. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2011;35(3):903-911.
34. Zajonc RB. Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. Amer Psychol. 1980;35(2):151-175.
35. Zajonc RB. On the primacy of affect. Amer Psychol. 1984;39(2):117-123.
36. Lazarus RS. Thoughts on the relations between emotion and cognition. Amer Psychol. 1982;37(9):1019-1024.
37. Lazarus RS. On the primacy of cognition. Amer Psychol. 1984;39(2):124-129.
38. Panksepp, J. Affective Neuroscience. Oxford University Press; 1998.
39. Rolls ET. A biased activation theory of the cognitive and attentional modulation of emotion. Front Hum Neurosci. 2013;7, Mar 18, 2013 ArtID: 74.
40. Whalen PJ, Rauch SL, Etcoff NL, McInerney SC, Lee MB, Jenike MA. Masked presentations of emotional facial expressions modulate amygdala activity without explicit knowledge. J Neurosci. 1998;18(1):411-418.
41. Clore GL, Ortony A. Appraisal theories: how cognition shapes affect into emotion. In: Lewis M, Haviland-Jones JM, Barrett LF, eds., Handbook of Emotions, 3rd edition. Guilford Press; 2008:628-642.
42. Ochsner KN, Gross JJ. The cognitive control of emotion. Trends Cog Sci 2005;9(5):242-249.
43. Ge T, Feng J, Grabenhorst F, Rolls ET. Componential Granger causality, and its application to identifying the source and mechanisms of the top-down biased activation that controls attention to affective vs. sensory processing. Neuroimage 2012;59(2):1846-1858.
44. Carpenter GA, Grossberg S. A massively parallel architecture for a self-organizing neural pattern recognition machine. Comp Vis Graph Image Proc. 1987;37(1):54-115.
45. Reddy WM. The unavoidable intentionality of affect: The history of emotions and the neurosciences of the present day. Emot Rev. 2020;12(3):168-178.
46. Ekman P, Davidson RJ (eds.). The Nature of Emotions: Fundamental Questions. Oxford University Press; 1994.
47. Kragel PA, LaBar KS. Decoding the nature of emotion in the brain. Trends Cognit Sci. 2016;20(6),444-455.
48. Parvizi J. Corticocentric myopia: old bias in new cognitive sciences. Trends Cognit Sci. 2009;13(8):354-359.
49. Ghashghaei HT, Hilgetag CC, Barbas H. Sequence of information processing for emotions based on the anatomic dialogue between prefrontal cortex and amygdala. Neuroimage 2007;34(3):905-923.
50. Grossberg S, Seidman, D.. Neural dynamics of autistic behaviors: Cognitive, emotional, and timing substrates. Psychol Rev. 2006;113:483-525.
51. Franklin DJ, Grossberg S. A neural model of normal and abnormal learning and memory consolidation: Adaptively timed conditioning, hippocampus, amnesia, neurotrophins, and consciousness. Cognit Affect Behav Neurosci. 2017;17(1):24-76.
52. McElhinny B. Audacity of affect: Gender, race, and history in linguistic accounts of legitimacy and belonging. Ann Rev Anthro. 2010;399(1):309-328.
53. Reddy WM. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge University Press; 2001.
54. Westen D. The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. PublicAffairs; 2007.
55. Greenberg LS. Emotion-focused Therapy. American Psychological Association; 2010.
56. Linehan MM. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy of Borderline Personality Disorder. Guilford Press; 1993.
2. Levine DS. Healing the Reason-Emotion Split: Scarecrows, Tin Woodmen, and the Wizard. Routledge; 2021.
3. Pessoa L. The Cognitive-Emotional Brain. MIT Press; 2013.
4. Fuster JM. (2015). The Prefrontal Cortex. 5th edition. Elsevier Science; 2015.
5. Aggleton JP. The contribution of the amygdala to normal and abnormal emotional states. Trends Neurosci 1993;16(8):328-333.
6. Pessoa L, Kastner S, Ungerleider LG. Attentional control of the processing of neutral and emotional stimuli, Cognit Brain Res. 2002;15(1):31-45.
7. MacLean PD. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions. Plenum Press; 1990.
8. Pessoa L, Medina L, Hof PR, Desfilis E. Neural architecture of the vertebrate brain: implications for the interaction between emotion and cognition. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2019;107:296-312.
9. Cory GR Jr. The Consilient Brain: The Bioneurological Basis of Economics, Society, and Politics. Plenum Press; 2004.
10. Kahneman D. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 2011.
11. De Neys W (Ed.). Dual Process Theory 2.0. Routledge; 2018.
12. Levine DS. Modeling the instinctive-emotional-thoughtful mind. Cognit Syst Res. 2017;45(1):82-94.
13. Sander D, Grafman J, Zalla T. The human amygdala: an evolved system for relevance detection. Rev Neurosci. 2003;14(4):303-316.
14. Cunningham WA, Brosch T. Motivational salience: amygdala tuning from traits, needs, values, and goals. Curr Dir Psychol Sci. 2012;21(1):54-59.
15. Schoenbaum G, Setlow B, Saddoris M, Gallagher M. Encoding predicted outcome and acquired value in orbitofrontal cortex during cue sampling depends upon input from basolateral amygdala, Neuron, 2003;39(5):855-867.
16. Zikopoulos B., Barbas, H.. Pathways for emotions and attention converge on the thalamic reticular nucleus in primates. J Neurosci. 2012;32(15):5338-5350. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4793-11.201.
17. Grossberg S. Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind. Oxford University Press; 2021.
18. John YJ, Zikopoulos B, Bullock D., Barbas H. The emotional gatekeeper: A computational model of attentional selection and suppression through the pathway from the amygdala to the inhibitory thalamic reticular nucleus. PLoS Comput Biol. 2016;12, e1004722.
19. John YJ, Wang J, Bullock D, Barbas H. Emotional intensity can enrich or degrade memories: Impact of the amygdalar pathway on hippocampus through inhibitory neurons. bioRxiv preprint, 2022: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.03.17.484812.
20. Levine DS. Neural dynamics of affect, gist, probability, and choice. Cognit Syst Res. 2012;15-16 (May-June), 57-72. doi:10.1016/j.cogsys.2011.07.002.
21. Levine DS. One or two minds? Neural network modeling of decision making by the unified self. Neural Networks, 2019;120(1):74-85. doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2019.08.008.
22. Sejnowski TJ. The Deep Learning Revolution. MIT Press; 2018.
23. Barrett LF. The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Soc Cognit Affect Neurosci. 2017;12:1-23.
24. Pessoa L. A network model of the emotional brain. Trends Cog Sci. 2017;21(5):357-371.
25. LeDoux JE. Emotion circuits in the brain. Ann Rev Neurosci. 2000;23(1):155-184.
26. Satterthwaite TD, Wolfe DH, Pinkham AE, Ruparel K, Elliott MA, Valdez JN, Overton E, Seubert J, Gur RE, Gur, RC, Loughead J. Opposing amygdala and ventral striatum connectivity during emotion identification. Brain Cognit. 2011;76(3):353-363. doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2011.04.005.
27. Stuber GD, Sparta DR, Stamatakis AM, Bonci A. Excitatory transmission from the amygdala to nucleus accumbens facilitates reward seeking. Nature 2011;475(7356):377-380.
28. Correia SS, McGrath AL, Lee A, Graybiel AM, Goosens KA. Amygdala–ventral striatum circuit activation decreases long-term fear. Elife 2016;5:e12669. doi: 10.7554/eLife.12669.
29. Berridge KC, Robinson TE. Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. Amer Psychol. 2016;71(8):670-679.
30. Dranias MR, Grossberg S, Bullock D. Dopaminergic and non-dopaminergic value systems in conditioning and outcome-specific revaluation. Brain Res. 2008;1238:239-287.
31. Reyna VF, Huettel SA. Reward, representation, and impulsivity: A theoretical framework for the neuroscience of risky decision making. In: Reyna VF, Zayas V, eds. . The Neuroscience of Risky Decision Making : American Psychological Association; 2014:11-42.
32. Shackman AJ, Salomons TV, Slagter HA, Fox AS, Winter JJ, Davidson RJ. The integration of negative affect, pain and cognitive control in the cingulate cortex. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2011;12(3):154-167.
33. Fan Y, Duncana NW, de Grecke M, Northoff G. Is there a core neural network in empathy? An fMRI based quantitative meta-analysis. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2011;35(3):903-911.
34. Zajonc RB. Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. Amer Psychol. 1980;35(2):151-175.
35. Zajonc RB. On the primacy of affect. Amer Psychol. 1984;39(2):117-123.
36. Lazarus RS. Thoughts on the relations between emotion and cognition. Amer Psychol. 1982;37(9):1019-1024.
37. Lazarus RS. On the primacy of cognition. Amer Psychol. 1984;39(2):124-129.
38. Panksepp, J. Affective Neuroscience. Oxford University Press; 1998.
39. Rolls ET. A biased activation theory of the cognitive and attentional modulation of emotion. Front Hum Neurosci. 2013;7, Mar 18, 2013 ArtID: 74.
40. Whalen PJ, Rauch SL, Etcoff NL, McInerney SC, Lee MB, Jenike MA. Masked presentations of emotional facial expressions modulate amygdala activity without explicit knowledge. J Neurosci. 1998;18(1):411-418.
41. Clore GL, Ortony A. Appraisal theories: how cognition shapes affect into emotion. In: Lewis M, Haviland-Jones JM, Barrett LF, eds., Handbook of Emotions, 3rd edition. Guilford Press; 2008:628-642.
42. Ochsner KN, Gross JJ. The cognitive control of emotion. Trends Cog Sci 2005;9(5):242-249.
43. Ge T, Feng J, Grabenhorst F, Rolls ET. Componential Granger causality, and its application to identifying the source and mechanisms of the top-down biased activation that controls attention to affective vs. sensory processing. Neuroimage 2012;59(2):1846-1858.
44. Carpenter GA, Grossberg S. A massively parallel architecture for a self-organizing neural pattern recognition machine. Comp Vis Graph Image Proc. 1987;37(1):54-115.
45. Reddy WM. The unavoidable intentionality of affect: The history of emotions and the neurosciences of the present day. Emot Rev. 2020;12(3):168-178.
46. Ekman P, Davidson RJ (eds.). The Nature of Emotions: Fundamental Questions. Oxford University Press; 1994.
47. Kragel PA, LaBar KS. Decoding the nature of emotion in the brain. Trends Cognit Sci. 2016;20(6),444-455.
48. Parvizi J. Corticocentric myopia: old bias in new cognitive sciences. Trends Cognit Sci. 2009;13(8):354-359.
49. Ghashghaei HT, Hilgetag CC, Barbas H. Sequence of information processing for emotions based on the anatomic dialogue between prefrontal cortex and amygdala. Neuroimage 2007;34(3):905-923.
50. Grossberg S, Seidman, D.. Neural dynamics of autistic behaviors: Cognitive, emotional, and timing substrates. Psychol Rev. 2006;113:483-525.
51. Franklin DJ, Grossberg S. A neural model of normal and abnormal learning and memory consolidation: Adaptively timed conditioning, hippocampus, amnesia, neurotrophins, and consciousness. Cognit Affect Behav Neurosci. 2017;17(1):24-76.
52. McElhinny B. Audacity of affect: Gender, race, and history in linguistic accounts of legitimacy and belonging. Ann Rev Anthro. 2010;399(1):309-328.
53. Reddy WM. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge University Press; 2001.
54. Westen D. The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. PublicAffairs; 2007.
55. Greenberg LS. Emotion-focused Therapy. American Psychological Association; 2010.
56. Linehan MM. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy of Borderline Personality Disorder. Guilford Press; 1993.