Emotion is an integral part of a person’s rationality and vision—literally—of reality. From studies on people who lost a part of their brain’s frontal cortex to researchers at the University of Toronto testing how emotion influences vision, neuroscientists are demonstrating that emotion affects every aspect of cognition. Indeed, without emotion human beings find it difficult to be rational.
Historically, from Plato to Descartes to most modern economists, it has been assumed and argued that logical decision-making excludes emotions and feelings. The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio upends that historical assumption. Damasio’s research on people with brain damage to their frontal cortex clearly demonstrates that emotion plays an important role in logical reasoning. In the preface to his seminal work, Descartes’ Error, Damasio writes::
…the reasoning system evolved as an extension of the automatic emotional system, with emotion playing diverse roles in the reasoning process…When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions…[I] see emotion as at least assisting reason and at best holding dialogue with it…I view emotion as delivering cognitive information, directly and via feelings…the brain systems that are jointly engaged in emotion and decision-making are generally involved in the management of social cognition and behavior.
Logical decisions are made when emotions are a part of the reasoning process. If emotions are taken out of the reasoning process, as occurred in Damasio’s patients, irrational behavior increases. One of my favorite television and movie characters, Commander Spock of Star Trek, is now tarnished after reading Damasio’s various studies. For how would Spock respond to Damasio’s finding that “Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior”?
A person’s emotions or mood are such integral parts of cognition that they sometimes play the role of gatekeeper for how and to what extent each one of us sees reality. Our vision is literally affected by our emotions. Positive and negative moods, according to a 2009 neuroscience study, affect the way we see the world around us by either broadening (positive) or narrowing (negative) our peripheral vision respectively. The study clearly demonstrates that our moods modulate the activity of the visual cortex “with positive affect broadening and negative affect narrowing the distribution, or scope, of one’s field of view (FOV).” Our feelings about (rather than for) people even determine if we see them as attractive or not. The more honest we believe someone to be, for example (and reported by Robert Sapolsky), the more likable they are to us “and the more likable, the more physically attractive” we see them to be (and vice versa). The reason, according to neuroscience, is that we do not ‘see’ with our eyes; rather, we see with our brains. Because it is our brains that see and not the eyes, emotions and opinions define our vision of reality.
Shouldn’t we be trying to create more positive environments at home, school and work, simply based on neuroscience, if we are interested in attaining our goals? If positive values such as compassion and trustworthiness increase your awareness of the world around you and your likability, wouldn’t that also increase your probability of achieving success? It appears as though the color of success is rose; for the argument of wearing the proverbial rose-tinted glasses just became stronger.
ARTICLE & BOOK:
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Group, Inc., 2005).
Robert Sapolsky, “Pretty Smart? Why We Equate Beauty with Truth,” The Wall Street Journal (January 17, 2014).
Taylor W. Schmitz, Eve De Rosa, and Adam K. Anderson, “Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding,” The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 22 (June 3, 2009).
Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).
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