Primary And Secondary Emotions Necessary For Better Decision Making

Do you start crying because you feel sad, or do your eyes produce tears, and therefore you feel sad? Do emotions cloud our thinking? The general opinion is that we start to cry because we are sad and that emotions cloud our thinking. This may be partially true, but science shows us that things might be more complex and that we cannot make the right decisions without using our emotions.

One of the oldest dualisms in Western thought is the mind and body, and it’s become recognized as Cartesian Dualism. It comes hand in hand with a different dualism: reason and emotion. Reason is the area of the mind, working at its most purely logical and rational level. Whereas, emotions are found in the lowly area of the body, busy with its chaotic, irrational passions.

This is Descartes´ error: the abyssal separation between body and mind, between the sizable, dimensioned, mechanically operated, infinitely divisible body stuff, on the one hand, and the unsizable, undimensioned, un-pushpullable, nondivisible mind stuff; the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body. Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism.

A. Damasio

Our mind and body are connected with each other. Damage to our brain by trauma, ischemic attack, or something else can affect our personality and emotions. Mind and body are not two separate things. The brain, the body, reason, as well as emotions are inseparably connected together into a human web. Emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason. The body and our emotions play a vital role in logical thinking. Our body and mind use emotions to help us make sense of our experiences. We have our body state, which is our body’s system of letting our brain know how everything is doing. When we feel emotions, the body is also sending signals to our brain to let us know what to feel, think, and do. At the same time, we have the emotional body state. You can think of this as past experiences and the feelings associated with them. Our brain uses information from both of these types of signals from the body to help us decide what to do about the things around us.

Our mind uses our experiences and emotions to create shortcuts that help us make decisions. Your brain uses what are known as somatic markers to attach certain thoughts or feelings about different choices you could make. Each option will have an emotion already attached to it from your life events that your mind can use to help you choose. And all of your past experiences contribute to these shortcuts, guiding you to know which way to go. To be rational, your brain needs to be able to listen to the emotions that your body is feeling.

There never has been doubt that, under certain circumstances, emotion disrupts reasoning…. Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior.

A. Damasio

Specific brain functions are performed by different areas of the brain working together. Their synchronized activity allows our brain to do the things it performs, like practical reasoning. No single part can do its work alone. The limbic system plays a role in processing emotions. The somatosensory cortex on the right plays a part in physical feelings (touch, joint position, pain, temperature) and visceral feelings (sensations of our organs). The third structure is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. All these structures are needed for practical reasoning.

Why are the limbic system and the somatosensory cortex involved in our reasoning? Without any disturbing emotions hindering us, shouldn’t we be better at practical reasoning? We can split our emotions into two different types. First, there is a collection of transformations occurring inside your body state. This is essentially your body’s general pattern of activity at any particular moment. What’s happening with your joints, muscles, and organs? How are they faring? Your brain is asking these questions all the time, and your body responds to these questions by transmitting back chemical and electrical signals. Anytime you sense an emotion, you’re feeling a pattern of transformation occurring in your body state. For instance, if you’re feeling joyful, you might feel your skin flush, your facial muscles have a smile, and the remaining of your muscles relax. If you’re feeling down, you might feel your body doing the opposite: blanching, frowning, and tightening. If you combine these whole feelings of the transformation occurring in your body state, what you acquire is an emotion’s general feeling. It is your body’s feeling going from one body state to another, which we can refer to as your emotional body state.

…regular feeling comes from a `readout´ of the body changes. … the brain waits for the body to report what actually has transpired. … feelings are winners among equals. And since what comes first constitutes a frame of reference for what comes after, feelings have a say on how the rest of the brain and cognition go about their business. Their influence is immense.

A. Damasio

Second, we have a collection of mental depictions, indicating something that prompts your emotional body state. These depictions could be tastes, smells, sounds, or any other perception. It also can be memories of those perceptions. For instance, the sound of your friend’s voice, the sight of his face, or the memory of his name could prompt the emotional body state of happiness. This collection of mental depictions combined with a body state give an emotion.

… the quality of one´s intuition depends on how well we have reasoned in the past; on how well we have classified the events of our past experience in relation to the emotions that preceded and followed them; and also on how well we have reflected on the successes and failures of our past intuitions.

A. Damasio

This is a significant piece of information and a strong source of guidance. Your negative or positive emotion is essentially your brain’s manner of telling itself this is a good or a bad thing. If your brain believes that it is good, you’ll sense a positive emotion, and you’ll want to search for it so that you can feel more of that emotion. If your brain sees it as bad, you will do the opposite.

If ensuring the survival of the body proper is what the brain first evolved for, then, when minded brains first appeared, they began by minding the body. And to ensure body survival as effectively as possible, nature, I suggest, stumbled on a highly effective solution: representing the outside world in terms of the modifications it causes in the body proper, that is, representing the environment by modifying the primordial representations of the body proper whenever an interaction between organism and environment takes place.

A. Damasio

Our deeper primary emotions, like fear, happiness, sadness, and anger, bypass the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. What happens if you see a snake. Your brain reads the snake’s sliding motion and transmits this detail to your limbic system for processing. Your limbic system reacts to the sliding and fires up a fear reaction. It prompts a range of neurological and biological processes that immediately change your body into an emotional body state of terror. Your heart begins beating, and your breath becomes shallow. Your body is prepared to fight or flight. The somatosensory cortex is also involved; you experience the sensations of your emotional body state of fear. Due to that, you feel afraid. Also, that inspires you to act fast. Thanks to this area of the brain, you don’t only stop and think about the snake’s terror in the abstract. If your ventromedial prefrontal cortex were involved, you would stay there and mention to yourself, `Hm, this seems to be a possibly dangerous circumstance. I wonder what I should do?´ Instead, you experience the sensations of your emotional body state of fear. Due to that, you feel afraid, and that makes you act fast. This is a primary emotion working.

That is the beauty of how emotion has functioned throughout evolution: it allows the possibility of making living beings act smartly without having to think smartly. Reasoning does what emotions do but achieves it knowingly. Reasoning gives us the option of thinking smartly before we act smart, and a good thing too: it is apparent that the emotions alone can solve many, but not all, the problems posed by our complex environment and that, on occasion, the solutions offered by emotion are actually counterproductive.

A. Damasio

Secondary emotions are gotten over evolutionary time and rely on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Emotion is a mixture of your emotional body state as well as the mental depictions that prompted it. You have the visual depiction of the snake in front of you. But there could be memories of former encounters with the same species, and there are words signifying information you have learned about this species of snake. With time, you began to correlate these depictions with various emotions. In order to feel this emotion, you still require your somatosensory cortex to keep you informed of your emotional body state. Also, you require your limbic system to assist to form that state. However, you also require something to take all of your several depictions of snakes and join them with several signals going in and out of your limbic system as well as the somatosensory cortex. This is what your ventromedial prefrontal cortex does. The limbic system, the somatosensory cortex, as well the VPC all unite in creating secondary emotions. And this makes that we are not governed by a fight or flight reaction but that we can look at the snake and study it without giving in to our primary emotion.

Emotions and the feelings are not a luxury, they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others. But they are also a way of guiding our own judgments and decisions. Emotions bring the body into the loop of reason.

A. Damasio

What is the function of secondary emotions in our practical reasoning? Practical reasoning is essentially pondering through our likely courses of action to decide what is best for us. In order to make choices swiftly and efficiently, your brain requires a means of going straight to the point, and this is the point where secondary emotions come to play. Somatic markers are a special kind of secondary feeling that plays a vital part in our decision-making processes. As you ponder all of your choices and their possible results, you feel secondary feelings about each and every one of them. Depending on if the emotions are positive or negative, they pull you toward or away from specific choices. The emotions help you `mark out´ your choices, telling you `go this way´ or `don’t go that way.´ Life continues throwing options at us, and our brains have to make sensible choices in reasonable amounts of time. In order to do this, they require the assistance of the somatic markers given by our secondary emotions. Our brains have to pay attention to our bodies and the emotions they show. Reason and emotion. Brain and body. Instead of being at odds with one another, they rely on each other. They have to work together. Or else, we become lost in a wilderness of infinite options.

Finally it is important to realize that defining emotion and feeling as concrete, cognitively and neurally, does not diminish their loveliness or horror, or their status in poetry or music. Understanding how we see or speak does not debase what is seen or spoken, what is painted or woven into a theatrical line. Understanding the biological mechanisms behind emotions and feelings is perfectly compatible with a romantic view of their value to human beings.

A. Damasio

Interesting links:

The Four Emotions Traders Have to Deal With, Lessons For Us All

What Our Basic Emotions Tell Us About Happiness

What Can a Pessimist Teach You About Happiness?

How You Keep Fooling Yourself: Cognitive Dissonance

You Cannot Know What You Do Not Know: Dunning-Kruger Effect

This article is based on the book `Descartes´ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain´ by Antonio Damasio, 1995, reprint 2005, Penguin Books.

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