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Thanks to:
• Tom Ward and Lisa Neal• Collaborators:
– Chris Eliasmith– Fred Kroon– Abninder Litt– Baljinder Sahdra– Cameron Shelley– Brandon Wagar, and others.
• Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada
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Outline
1. Emotional cognition
2. Mechanisms
3. Cognitive model
4. Social model
5. Neural models
6. Integrations
7. Conclusions
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Decision Making is Emotional
• Slovic et al: Affect heuristic.
• Loewenstein et al: Risk as feelings.
• Damasio: Somatic markers.
• Mellers: Emotion-based choice.
• Etc.
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Emotion in Science
• 1953 DNA• 1968 Watson
publishes The Double Helix
• 143 pages • 235 emotion words
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Watson’s Emotions
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Anger BeautyFear
Happiness
HopeInterestSadnessSurprise
Others
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Generatequestions
Try to answerquestions
Generate answers
Evaluateanswers
happinesshope
happinesssurprise
beautyhappiness
avoidboredom
fearangerfrustration
worry disappointment
interestcuriositywonder
Emotions in Scientific Thinking
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Emotion in Law
• 1994: Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman murdered.
• 1995: O. J. Simpson found not guilty.
• 1996: civil trial finds O. J. guilty.
• Acquittal result of emotional coherence.
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Mechanistic ExplanationsMechanism Parts Relations Changes
Social people associate,
communicate
influence, decisions
Cognitive mental representations
implications,
associations
mental processes
Neural neurons excitation, inhibition
activations, synaptic
Molecular proteins physical connections
chemical reactions
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Cognitive Mechanism: HOTCO
• Beliefs and goals are represented by nodes in a connectionist network.
• Nodes have activations representing degree of acceptance, but also valences representing emotional value.
• Activations and valences spread through the network until a stable conclusion is reached.
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Applications of HOTCO
• OJ
• Experiment by Sinclair & Kunda on motivated stereotypes.
• Experiments by Westen et al. on motivated inference in politics.
• For details see Thagard in Cognition and Emotion, 2003.
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Social Mechanism: HOTCO 3
• Group decisions are sometimes based on emotional consensus.
• Consensus arises in part from emotional communication: – Contagion (includes attachment)
– Altruism (includes compassion)
– Means-ends
– Empathy
– Analogy
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HOTCO 3
• Individuals are HOTCO 2 processes.• Emotional communication takes place by transfer
of emotions between individuals.• Consensus sometimes reached:
– Couple deciding on movie.– Academic department hiring decision.
• Thagard and Kroon, Mind and Society, forthcoming.
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Neural Mechanism• GAGE model: Wagar & Thagard,
Psychological Review, 2004. • Brain areas: amygdala, hippocampus, nucleus
accumbens, ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
VMPFC
NAc
HC
Amg
VTA
Somatic state
To Action/Overt
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Applications of GAGE
• Phineas Gage.
• Behavior of Damasio’s patients with VMPFC damage on the Iowa gambling task.
• Effects of context on emotion in Schacter & Singer.
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Relation of GAGE and HOTCO
• GAGE is more neurologically realistic:– Spiking neurons.– Anatomically organized.
• But HOTCO can be viewed as an approximation to GAGE:– Units encoded by neuronal groups.– Activations encoded by spiking behavior of groups of
neurons.– Valences encoded by spiking in emotional brain areas
such as the amygdala.
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New Neural Model
• Litt, Eliasmith, and Thagard: “Why Losses Loom Larger than Gains”, in progress.
• Uses Neural Engineering framework. • Models loss aversion in decision making.• Adds more brain areas relevant to emotional
cognition.• Future applications:
– other neuroeconomics applications.– social cognitive neuroscience.
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OFC
AMYG
5-HTRD
DAmid
VS
ACC
DLPFC
Abbreviations: 5-HTRD, raphe dorsalis serotonergic neurons; ACC, anterior cingulate cortex; AMYG, amygdala; DAmid, midbrain dopaminergic neurons; DLPFC, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; OFC, orbitofrontal cortex; VS, ventral striatum.
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Molecular Mechanisms
• Happiness: dopamine.• Sadness: serotonin.• Fear: cortisol.• Love: oxytocin, vasopressin.• Thagard: “How molecules matter to mental
computation”, Philosophy of Science, 2002.• Lower level mechanisms? - no. See Litt et al., “Is
the brain a quantum computer?”, Cognitive Science, forthcoming.
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Research Strategy
• Develop models of mechanisms at all relevant levels.
• Integrate models by relating – parts: decompose from higher to lower.
– relations: decompose if possible.
– changes: show how higher changes result in part from lower changes, but go in other direction too.
• Full reduction is rarely possible: pluralistic reductionism.
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Normative Philosophical Issues
• HOTCO explains motivated inference.• GAGE models explains weakness of will.• Normative claim: Rationality requires removal of
emotion from cognition. But:– Removal is neurologically impossible.– Not desirable: lose motivation for science, etc.
• Need other strategies for ensuring that emotion influences cognition positively.– Informed intuition; social constraints.