Hot%20Thought:%20Mechanisms%20of%20Emotional%20Cognition

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Hot Thought Mechanisms of Emotional Cognition

• Paul Thagard
• pthagard_at_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

• Emotional cognition
• Mechanisms
• Cognitive model
• Social model
• Neural models
• Integrations
• 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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Watsons Emotions
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Emotions in Scientific Thinking
beauty happiness
happiness hope
happiness surprise
interest curiosity wonder
Generate questions
Try to answer questions
Generate answers
Evaluate answers
fear anger frustration
avoid boredom
worry
disappointment
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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 Explanations
Mechanism 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
Amg
Somatic state
HC
VTA
NAc
To Action/ Overt
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Applications of GAGE

• Phineas Gage.
• Behavior of Damasios 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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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.