The Neuroscience of Emotional Decision Making

[Music] Hi, my name is Olcric Olson and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria and in my spare time I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So we're going to continue on with decision making and because we've got some gaps between these episodes I thought I'd do a quick refresher just to get us on the same page and then I'll dive into today's topic, emotional decision making or at least what is emotion and how does it fit into decision making. So we started with this concept of value and expected value and value is the inherent worth of something to you or what economists would call the utility of something. Now why this is important is this is the basis for our decisions. We tend to choose things with higher utility or value and we tend to not choose things with lower utility or value and as I pointed out numerous times this could apply to something simple like food. We discussed my love affair for pizza. So if I have a choice between pizza and stir fry I choose pizza because it has a higher value or utility to me but it could also apply for complex things like you know what major do I want to take in school. I'm actually an Ontario visiting my son and he's trying to decide what to do and he's thinking astrophysics and he's weighing that against some other choices so right now astrophysics has the highest value for him and that's what he chooses and that let us into our second piece of decision making which is a very simple model of decision making which is always choose the highest value and there you go you know you could be done that's what you do you navigate the world and always choose the highest value but then we discussed the concept of exploration versus exploitation and the idea is simple sometimes you deliberately choose a lower value and the reason you do this is because one you might be uncertain of the values of choices available to you so you have to try something with an unknown value just to see what the value is so you try a new pizza restaurant you've never tried before because it could be the best pizza you've ever had or you actually deliberately choose a lower value option now why would I do that why would I take a lower value option well the answer is really simple you take the lower value option quite simply because the world changes you know the restaurant that didn't have the best pizza might have fired the old cook and hired a new cook who's the best pizza chef in your hometown and as a result you let us sample the world so that's exploration exploitation is the decision to choose the higher value now how does the brain figure out when to explore and when to exploit it's actually a very complicated problem it goes down to basically certainty about the world typically if you're uncertain about your environment you might explore more and if you are certain you might explore less it also is individual some people naturally explore more that's just how they're wired some people explore less so there's a lot of factors that choose that exploration rate and it's also not constant over time for instance when you first move to a new city you might have a high exploration rate but once you learn that city and you learn which pizza places are good and which ones are bad you might dial down your exploration rate okay so there's decision-making we know everything nope I brought in the concept of system one and system two these idea of gothunch decisions and the idea of analytical decisions if you think about this in terms of value which is where I want to keep it today because it will afford us talking about emotional decision-making a gothunch decision is basically just choosing the highest value option at that point in time that's really what it is one way to think of system two is that's the system that does two things one it makes a decision to explore which is analytical in nature itself because you have to consciously say you know what I'm gonna choose something else today but it's also a time to assess values so system two is re-appraising values because your gothunch assessment of value might be incorrect so a system one decision is a simple way to think about it it's your gothunch it's just choosing the highest value option whereas a system two decision is basically a decision to explore and or assessing the values in front of us okay is that all you need to know about decision-making no as humans we are emotional creatures now finally enough I don't think we've talked about the amygdala for a while but guess what we're gonna talk about the amygdala and it's not just the amygdala the amygdala is a part of the brain involved in emotion but there's a lot of other parts of the brain involved in emotion there is the insular cortex there are mid-brained structures and in fact the this is classically referred to as the limbic system now I've mentioned this in the past I'm not a big fan of the phrase limbic system because a lot of models of the limbic system include things that are a part of the cortex but generally you're talking about mid-brained structures so the basal ganglia plays a role in emotion the hippocampus plays a role in emotion the thalamus and the hypothalamus play a role in emotion we've talked a lot about what emotion is so I'm not gonna go through all of it but there's also the insular cortex the fornix the septum the olfactory bulb the mammillary body and of course the amygdala so if you google limbic system you're gonna see this long list of mid-brained structures they will throw in a few cortical things sometimes you see the singular cortex sometimes you see the frontal cortex but generally we're talking about mid-brained nuclei that just respond to emotional stimuli I'll give you a good example of this the hypothalamus which we've talked about before is an example of part of the limbic system because it controls the pituitary gland it has control of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system therefore it makes your heart beat faster it makes your heart slow down it makes your breathing pick up it makes your breathing slow down it plays a role in temperature regulation fluid balance eating control sleep wake regulation sexual responses so the hypothalamus you know is one of these things it controls you know a lot of the physical responses to an emotional stimulus like I said I don't want to die a ton into the emotion because we did it at depth I really want to focus on what is the role of emotion and decision making and it's pretty straightforward it comes back to our concept of value now I've used this example in the past in fact I used it in a recent TED Talk the ultimatum game you know this is a game that was invented by economists to prove a point in my mind but it's kind of a you know it's a good use case for this idea of emotion and decision making so the ultimatum game is fairly straightforward there's two players one player is giving an amount of money and their job is to essentially offer some of that money or all of that money to another player so let's say they're giving a hundred dollars their jobs to make an offer to the other player making offer to split it say 50 50 they could make it all trueistic offer and give away 80% of the money and keep 20% they could be greedy and keep 90% and give away 10 that's their job make the offer the other player has to say yes or no that's their job if they say yes the share recurs so if I offer you 80 dollars and I say I'll keep 20 and I say yes I get 80 dollars you keep your 20 and we're done if I offer you 10 dollars and say I'll keep 90 I say yes I get the money I say no no one gets any money now that's the there's a couple keys to understand the ultimatum game and a lot of people if you don't understand the rules the game doesn't make sense well number one the offer the decision on the offers final the offers final so if I say yes the share occurs if I'm the person being offered the money if I say no no one gets any money rule number one rule number two you only play one time now rule number two is the most important rule because if you played more than once then logically because I want to keep this analytical at first you could argue that saying no to an offer makes sense because you're sending a message basically saying if you don't treat me fairly I'm gonna reject offers until you treat me fairly that's actually a logical or analytical system to strategy however if you only play one time you should accept any offer and the reason you're simple if you are completely doing this from an analytical perspective any money is better than no money so you should accept any offer now you do this in humans you find some interesting things. First of all, you find no one's altruistic. He hates to disappoint you, but everyone's greedy. No one ever says, well, you could have $8. I'll keep 20. People, you know, the best they do is 50, 50, and then they get greedy. Now, what you find with humans is people say, "No to unfair offer sometimes." So if I say, "I'll keep $90," you have 10, a fair number of people reject that offer. Now, the question is why? The analytical brain is being overridden because analytically, you should take the $10. It's the best offer. Why do you say, "No?" Well, your emotional system. Your emotional system flares up and says, "This is nonsense. I'm not doing this." All right, reject the offer. Now, from a decision-making perspective, being mechanical about this, what's actually happening? Well, there's a value for accepting the offer, and there is a value for rejecting the offer. And if you were just going to go in terms of money, the value for rejecting the offer is zero, and the value for accepting the offer is 10, and the probability would be 100 on either case. So those are your expected values. It's an easy choice. But what is the emotional system actually doing? In a sense, it's artificially inflating values. It's going to increase the value of saying, "No," or rejecting the unfair offer. And it's going to increase it to a point that that choice has more perceived value than accepting the money. So you're still working with your simple decision-making model. It's just the emotional system is biasing values. And that's what it does. You know, I'd like to think of an example. You know, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this on the podcast, but before I went back to school, I was a high school gym teacher for a while. And you know, when you watch kids pick teams, it's almost hilarious because you make two captains, and you start picking kids from the class to be on your team. And you can see this dilemma. You can literally see on a kid's face going, "Well, I should pick Johnny because he's the big strong athlete, and he'll help my team win." But it makes my best friend. And so from an analytical perspective, you take Johnny, but emotion overrides this, and you end up picking your best friend because you're it's your best friend. It's your emotional system overriding values. This was me last night. I'm trying to lose a bit of weight, you know, be healthy, all that stuff. And I had a choice between a piece of fruit and a chocolate chip cookie. Given my view of the world, the pre-cissive fruit had higher value, yet my emotional system overrode that value and gave a higher value to the chocolate chip cookie. So I ended up getting the chocolate chip cookie. And it was fantastic. So that's the role of the emotional system in decision making. It basically biases values. And in terms of a practical real-world tip, and we'll come back to this in future episode. But here's one right now. The emotional system we've talked about, it's a lot over the years. Remember it responds quickly and it fades quickly. That's like the anger thing. It flares up and then it flares down. So if you're about to make a decision and you think the emotional system might be biasing your values, just count to 30. Go for a walk. All right, just take yourself away for a short period of time and you might find that your values are different. Okay, there it is. Emotional decision making. We've actually talked about it before. This is sort of the new version and a bit of a recap to fit into this season's run on decision making. Don't forget the website, that neuroscienceguy.com links to Etsy and Patreon. Etsy, fire merch, please. It's kind of cool. I think it's cool, but I'm a bit of a nerd. There's links to Patreon. Thank you so much for those of you that support us. Even a couple of dollars, right? Anything like that. You know what? It helps. It helps us because it goes to graduate students in my lab. Social media, X-threads and Twitter at that neuroscience guy, we really want to know what you want to know, what the neuroscience of daily life, send us inspiration. And of course, the podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And if you haven't already, please subscribe. My name is Olof Kregelsen and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon for another full episode of the podcast.