somatic market hypothesis
Subject:
Discuss and critically assess the Somatic Marker Hypothesis It is a well known fact that decision making has become an important interest in the recent years in psychology. There are a lot of theories to provide sufficient information to understand the process of decision making. Most of them come as genuine theories whereas several of them come from the previously stated theories as a criticism. One of the most important theories represented about the cognitive process of decision making in the literature is by A. Damasio’s (1994) called Somatic Marker Hypothesis.
In general what this theory proposes is that body states act and that can be related with several choices based on prior outcomes. So why is the hypothesis named as somatic marker? If we take a look at the origin of the terms used for identifying the hypothesis, the word “somatic” comes from the Greek word “soma”. Soma means body as the feelings that allow human beings to make decisions are bodily. And when it comes to the other word “marker”, it is used as the gut feeling that marks the chosen alternative. The key terms used to define somatic marker hypothesis can be given as emotion, somatic, body-loop, as-if body loop and somatic marker. Emotion is mostly defined by the feelings like anger, happiness, sadness etc... by most of the human beings whereas Damasio defined it in a different way stating it more precisely that each emotion cause changes in the body and brain.
Somatic or body states can be defined by the changes in the body due to the emotions. These changes include facial expressions, heart rate, muscle movements... and also mental representations of the bodily changes. That is, these mental representations, called as-if body states, roughly classify the complex array of physiological changes. These mental representations evoke the subjective experience of a feeling. For example if we think of anger as a strong emotion, it can evoke the mental representation that
Discuss and critically assess the Somatic Marker Hypothesis It is a well known fact that decision making has become an important interest in the recent years in psychology. There are a lot of theories to provide sufficient information to understand the process of decision making. Most of them come as genuine theories whereas several of them come from the previously stated theories as a criticism. One of the most important theories represented about the cognitive process of decision making in the literature is by A. Damasio’s (1994) called Somatic Marker Hypothesis.
In general what this theory proposes is that body states act and that can be related with several choices based on prior outcomes. So why is the hypothesis named as somatic marker? If we take a look at the origin of the terms used for identifying the hypothesis, the word “somatic” comes from the Greek word “soma”. Soma means body as the feelings that allow human beings to make decisions are bodily. And when it comes to the other word “marker”, it is used as the gut feeling that marks the chosen alternative. The key terms used to define somatic marker hypothesis can be given as emotion, somatic, body-loop, as-if body loop and somatic marker. Emotion is mostly defined by the feelings like anger, happiness, sadness etc... by most of the human beings whereas Damasio defined it in a different way stating it more precisely that each emotion cause changes in the body and brain.
Somatic or body states can be defined by the changes in the body due to the emotions. These changes include facial expressions, heart rate, muscle movements... and also mental representations of the bodily changes. That is, these mental representations, called as-if body states, roughly classify the complex array of physiological changes. These mental representations evoke the subjective experience of a feeling. For example if we think of anger as a strong emotion, it can evoke the mental representation that
References: Barnes, A. and P. Thagard (1996) Emotional decisions. Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Erlbaum, 426-429. HTML Damasio, A.R. (1996). Descartes’ Error . Tiago V. Maia and James L. McClelland (2005), The somatic marker hypothesis: still many questions but no answers Cavedini, P., Riboldi, G., D’Annucci, A., Belotti, P., Cisima, M., Bellodi, L., 2002a. Decision making heterogeneity in obsessive compulsive disorder: ventromedial prefrontal cortex function predicts different treatment outcomes. Neuropsychologia 40, 205–211. Damasio, A.R. (1996) The Somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex Damasio, A.R. (1999). The feeling of what happens. New York: Harcourt-Brace & Company. Damasio, A.R., Tranel, D. & Damasio, H. (1991). “Somatic markers and the guidance of behaviour: theory and preliminary testing” (pp. 217–229). In H.S. Levin, H.M. Eisenberg & A.L. Bechara, A., Damasio, A.R., Damasio, H. & Anderson, S.W. (1994). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition, 50, 7–12. Some more researches from the universities: Waterloo, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford University.