Emotion and Decision Making

1932 Words4 Pages

How Logic Relates to Emotion The earlier schools of thought were seen to view emotion as a product of mental process that occurred as a result of stimulus but before the mind could have enough time to analyze the situation fully. They therefore treated emotion as based on intuition than logic. This view changed after. Daniel Schater, (2011) initiated this understanding after developing the two factor theory which viewed emotion as a product of an interplay between intuitive and logical processes. According to him, the physiological process occurs immediately after the perception of a stimulus. Thus the heart will start racing immediately a person sees a snake. However, the feeling part of the emotion only occurs after the person has consciously analyzed the situation. Thus, fear comes as a result of cognitively analyzing and understanding the real danger that is posed by the snake. This theory would help explain the reason children do not fear snakes and will even play with them. If emotion was to be totally an intuitive occurrence, then intuition would make the child develop emotions of fear. Myers (2004) further supports this by relating emotions as products of a conscious judgment process. The person has to be aware that a situation deserves fear and acknowledge the same for the emotion of fear to manifest itself. This theory has been supported by Alter et al., (2007). In his view, there has to be active judgment and evaluation of the situation or the stimulus for the emotional process to be initiated. All kinds of stimuli have to be perceived, and then processed, analyzed and after the judgment process, then emotion occurs. The same stimuli cause different kinds of emotions in the same person. The sight of a wild animal in a... ... middle of paper ... ...aming Bias: A Randomized Trial". J Gen Intern Med 26 (12): 1411–1417. Rusou, Z., Usher, M., & Zakay, D. (2013). Pitting intuitive and analytical thinking against each other: The case of transitivity: Psychon Bull Rev, doi: DOI 10.3758/s13423-013-0382-7 Schneider D, Lam D, Bayliss AP, and Dux PE (2012). Cognitive Load Disrupts Implicit Theory- of-Mind Processing: Psychological Science 2012 23: 842. doi: 10.1177/0956797612439070 Sinclair M. (2010). Misconceptions about intuition: Psychological Inquiry, 21, 378–386. doi: 10.1080/1047840X.2010.523874 Steinberg, L. (2007). Risk Taking in Adolescence: New Perspectives: Brain and Behavioral Science, vol. 16 no. 2, p. 55-59. Stern, E. R., Gonzalez, R., Welsh, R. C., and Taylor, S. F. (2010) Updating Beliefs for a Decision: Neural Correlates of Uncertainty and Underconfidence: The Journal of Neuroscience 30, 23:8032– 8041.

Open Document