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Hot Thought: Mechanisms of Emotional Cognition

Paul Thagard

pthagard@uwaterloo.ca

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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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Individual Decisions

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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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Why O.J. Was Acquitted

Solid lines are excitatory links; dotted lines are inhibitory.

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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.

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Conclusions

1. Cognition is emotional.2. Mechanisms operate at

four levels: social, cognitive, neural, molecular.

3. Mechanisms can be integrated and evaluated.

4. Web: cogsci.uwaterloo.ca

5. Book: Hot Thought, MIT Press, 2006.