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 |  Subject: Idiots in science: emotion overrides rational choices because value and emotion are handled in the same part of the brain  Wed Jul 03, 2013 3:17 am | |
| Deciding to buy a pair of Jimmy Choos or a sports car may feel like a battle of wills between your head and your heart, but its really all in the mind, according to a new study.
Scientists from Duke University have found that the desperate urge to buy something sometimes feels irresistible because emotion and value are handled by the same part of the brain.
This could also be the reason why emotional charity appeals are so successful.
Researchers investigating 'neuroeconomics' - the way the brain values things - have found that the processes that determine emotion and value both take place in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), located between our eyes.
This confuses us and weakens our ability to make impartial judgements about economic value over desire and makes us more likely to impulsively buy things even if we don't need them or can't afford them.
Dr Scott Huettell of the Center for Interdisciplinary Decision Science at Duke University, North Carolina, said: 'The vmPFC handles value tradeoffs such as ‘is that product worth parting with my hard-earned money?’ This says that your emotions would enter into that tradeoff.'
Neuroscientist Amy Winecoff, who led the research, added: 'The neuroscience fits with your intuitive understanding, emotions appear to be relying on the same value system.'
According to Dr Huettel judging value and emotion were known by scientists to happen independently in the cortex but were unaware of a link between the two.
In the study, published in the journal Neuroscience, subjects were first trained to do 'reappraisal,' in which they could change their emotional response to a situation.
'In reappraisal you reassess the meaning of an emotional stimulus, rather than trying to avoid the emotional stimulus or suppress your reaction to it,' Winecoff said.
While the subjects’ brains were being scanned using functional MRI, they were shown images of evocative scenes and faces.
After each image the subjects were told to either let their feelings flow or to practice reappraisal to change their thoughts.
Then they were asked to rate how positive or negative they felt.
This overlap in the brain confuses us and weakens our ability to make impartial judgements about economic value over desire and makes us more likely to impulsively buy things - even if we don't need them or can't afford them
In the case of 'an unregulated positive affect' - allowing an emotional response - the vmPFC was shown to be working harder, which the researchers say could be used to predict how much value a person is putting on something.
But when the subjects supressed their emotion responses to positive images activity diminished indicating the images were less valuable to the subjects.
'This changes our frame of reference for thinking about these things,' Huettel said.
He added that advertisers have long been using emotional appeals to get people to value their products, 'but they didn’t know why it worked.'
Previous studies had focused only on reappraisal of negative emotions, but this time around the Duke scientists wanted to watch people reappraise both negative and positive responses.
'We have kind of a skewed picture because this has only been done on the negative,' Winecoff said.
'This changes our frame of reference for thinking about these things.
'It’s not the case that you never want to reappraise a positive emotion but when buying a house or a car, it’s a good idea to dampen your infatuation down a bit,' he added.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2353719/So-THATS-resist-new-shoes-Scientists-discover-emotion-value-handled-the-brain.html#ixzz2Xxqzk53T
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