Strange: Emotions 101

This is about my quest towards getting a deeper understanding of emotions. I jotted down a few questions. And then the rest of the post consists of quotes, without permission, from links that I liked.

My understanding that emotion skews perception of reality. How does it happen?

Emotions stand for Robin Hood / communist behavior. How does the mind make peace with such "unfairness". Kadai thengai (eduthu vazhi Pilaaiyarukku odaikkardhu) and Rob Peter (to pay Paul).

An emotional person looks at a logical person as so inhuman. How exactly does an emotional person see the other kind?

What creates emotions? I have started to consider the possibility that emotions can be controlled and steered.

Behavior regulation can happen only though an understanding of emotions. Thought, without emotions, cannot regulate behavior.

Now to the reading material. I found each of these links to be interesting. I learned new stuff.

https://www.verywellmind.com/theories-of-emotion-2795717:

In psychology, emotion is often defined as a complex state of feeling that results in physical and psychological changes that influence thought and behavior.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_perception: "While the visual system is the means by which emotional information is gathered, it is the cognitive interpretation and evaluation of this information that assigns it emotional value, garners the appropriate cognitive resources, and then initiates a physiological response. This process is by no means exclusive to visual perception and in fact may overlap considerably with other modes of perception, suggesting an emotional sensory system comprising multiple perceptual processes all of which are processed through similar channels."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis:

"When individuals make decisions, they must assess the incentive value of the choices available to them, using cognitive and emotional processes. When the individuals face complex and conflicting choices, they may be unable to decide using only cognitive processes, which may become overloaded. Emotions, consequently, are hypothesized to guide decision-making.

Emotions, as defined by Damasio, are changes in both body and brain states in response to stimuli. Physiological changes (such as muscle tone, heart rate, endocrine activity, posture, facial expression, and so forth) occur in the body and are relayed to the brain where they are transformed into an emotion that tells the individual something about the stimulus that they have encountered. Over time, emotions and their corresponding bodily changes, which are called "somatic markers", become associated with particular situations and their past outcomes.

When making subsequent decisions, these somatic markers and their evoked emotions are consciously or unconsciously associated with their past outcomes, and influence decision-making in favor of some behaviors instead of others."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/somatic-marker-hypothesis: Exceptionally fascinating article:

"The interaction between emotion and cognition takes center stage in the work of Damasio whose “Somatic Marker Hypothesis” has been among the most influential theories of emotion in recent years. According to Damasio (1994, 1999), somatic markers are emotional reactions with a strong somatic component that support decision making, including rational decision making. These reactions are based upon the individual’s previous experiences with similar situations. Somatic markers permit a comparatively fast preselection of the relevant alternatives which are then subjected to a more detailed cognitive processing for the final decision. In doing so, somatic makers increase the efficiency and accuracy of human decision making. Following Damasio, decision making would be almost impossible if detailed cognitive processing of all the available alternatives were necessary.

Damasio refers to several case studies and experiments that seem to show that the inability to experience emotions results in a severe impairment of rational decision-making. In an experiment conducted by Bechara et al. (1997), healthy controls and patients with emotional deficits had to perform a gambling task which required a rational decision for the most advantageous strategy in order to gain as much money as possible. The controls started with an emotional reaction, then they adopted the advantageous strategy before they were finally able to tell what the advantageous strategy was, a few trials later. Patients, by contrast, showed no emotional reaction and continued to use the disadvantageous strategy throughout the experiment, although they also realized what the advantageous strategy was. The experiments support the basic idea underlying the somatic marker hypothesis, namely that rational decision making requires emotional reactions.

Note that these experiments seem to indicate also that, in contrast to the hypothesis of Oatley & Johnson-Laird (1987), emotional reaction is an ongoing process that does not require unexpected events or specific junctions in the proceeding of our plans. Second, in order to perform the function described, emotions have to be very specific, and third, they have to acquire this specificity independently from cognitive processes: In the above experiment, the cognitive assessment follows only a while after the emotional reaction has set in.

The Somatic Marker HypothesisThe findings reviewed here, and other related observations, have led to the development of a framework that is termed the somatic marker hypothesis. In a nutshell, the theory posits that feelings and emotions give rise to “somatic markers,” which serve as guideposts that help steer behavior in an advantageous direction. Deprived of these somatic markers, VM patients lose the ability to experience appropriate emotional responses to various stimuli and events. We have proposed that the absence of these emotional responses – evidenced, for example, by the missing SCRs in the experiments described above – leads to defective planning and decision-making; this, in turn, leads to socially inept and inappropriate behavior that is characteristic of VM patients.

Emotional neuroscience and psychophysiological research now challenges the view that rational choice and emotional processing are unrelated or opposed, with evidence for potential beneficial effects of emotion responses on decision making.

Changing moods influence the cognitive weighting of decision parameters, with low mood (and implicitly low autonomic reactivity) linked to a preference for low-risk, low-reward outcomes (Smith and Ellsworth, 1985), while anxiety (typically engendering heightened sympathetic tone) leads to a heightened intolerance of uncertainty (Stern et al., 2009). Together these studies illustrate the integration of autonomic control with cognitive processes underlying decision making. [[Low risk, low reward and heightened intolerance of uncertainty are both same, no? Yet WHILE is used.]]

Given the role of incentive learning in the encoding of reward, it is interesting to consider how the value conferred by this process is retrieved to determine choice performance. Because the choice tests are often conducted many days after incentive learning, in extinction the rat is forced to rely on their memory of specific action–outcome associations and the current relative value of the instrumental outcomes. So how is value encoded for retrieval during this test?
A currently influential theory, the somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio, 1994), proposes that value is retrieved through the operation of the same processes through which it was encoded. According to this view, decisions based on the value of specific goals are determined by reexperiencing the emotional effects associated with contact with that goal. With regard to outcome devaluation effects, for example, the theory could not be more explicit:

When a bad outcome connected with a given response option comes to mind, however fleetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling … that forces attention on the negative outcome to which the given action may lead, and functions as an automated alarm signal which says: Beware of danger ahead if you choose the option that leads to this outcome. The signal may lead you to reject, immediately, the negative course of action and thus make you choose between other alternatives.

An alternative theory proposes that reward values, once determined through incentive learning, are encoded abstractly (e.g., X is good or Y is bad and so on) and, as such, from this perspective they are not dependent on the original emotional effects induced by contact with the goal during the encoding of incentive value for their retrieval (see Balleine and Dickinson, 1998a; Balleine, 2005, for further discussion).
We have conducted several distinct series of experiments to test these two hypotheses and, in all of these, the data suggest that after incentive learning, incentive values are encoded abstractly and do not involve the original emotional processes that established those values during their retrieval. [Huh?? Somatic is wrong? Emotions not involved? Just plain memory is it?]] By S.B. Ostlund, ... B.W. Balleine, in Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference, 2008

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/17/science/intensity-of-emotion-tied-to-perception-and-thinking.html: [[fascinating]]

https://silvialisam.com/data-visualization-people-remember-the-feeling-not-the-numbers-db0018dc9998: