The role of emotion in decision making. (360G-Wellcome-078865_Z_05_Z)

My goal is to understand, from a neurobiological perspective, how emotion influences decision making processes. The idea that emotion influences our decisions is captured in psychological terms by Thorndike's law of effect, which states that actions followed by feelings of satisfaction are more likely to be generated in the future than those followed by negative feelings. A more recent neuropsychological literature suggests maladaptive decision making is associated with pathology to brain regions mediating emotion, as exemplified by OFC damage. An emerging theoretical framework suggests that multiple systems, in the most simple model an emotional and a rational system, compete for behavioural control. I propose a research programme that addresses how emotion influences decision making informed by theoretical perspectives, from reinforcement learning and behavioural economics, to explore an hypothesis that emotion provides predictive, competing and biasing influences on decision making processes. My experimental approach will involve behavioural, neuropharmacological and functional neuroimaging experiments in healthy volunteer subjects. I will also study patients with focal lesions to regions implicated in mediating between emotion and decision making. In the latter I propose an hypothesis based approach to test predictions arising out of functional neuroimaging findings, to determine the precise contribution of identified regions to emotional modulation of decision making.