Welcome back to week four. In this week we will talk about emotions, feelings, and motivation. This time we're going to talk about what emotions are versus what feelings are. We're going to talk about what emotions do. We're going to talk about what wanting is and what motivation is. We're also going to talk about different ways in which we can assess and measure emotions and feelings and motivation. And finally we're going to look at some examples of how this can be used in real life settings. Let's start by looking at some definitions of emotions and feelings. Emotions we define as an organism's expression of an inner or bodily states, a bodily response to an event with a mechanical and stimulus response to basis. And it typically occurs without or even before awareness. Conversely, feelings are defined as an organism's experience of being in a certain emotional state. It's always associated with awareness, and it's also what we can call introspective. One way to think about the relationship between emotions and feelings, is to think of it as a thermometer model, what we call the emotional thermometer. Let's look at that model. You can have emotions without feelings, but you can never have feelings without emotions. This means that emotions always need to be there before you can have feelings. The thermometer model assumes that emotions always are present. And until a certain point, emotional responses are always unconscious. But at a crucial point, emotional responses are so strong that they become feelings as well. A very important aspect of emotions is to think about arousal and valence. Arousal is what we call the strength or the amplification or the amplitude of emotions. They can be low or they can be high. And they are what we call bi-valent. This means that you can't just look at arousal and tell whether pe, people are enjoying themselves or are fearful. Conversely, valence is what we call the direction of the emotions. So whether an emotion is positive or negative. But it rarely tells you anything about the strength of the emotion. And therefore we have two different dimensions when we talk about emotions. We talk about arousal, and we talk about valence. And this can be shown in the following model. As you can see on the right side arousal can go from low to high, and valence goes from negative to positive. And what we tend to see, is that for strong positive and strong negative valence, the arousal is high versus when something is dull or boring and neutral valence arousal tends to be low. In the model to the left we are showing the effects of raw data, where you can see that the relationship between arousal and valence has this same U-shaped curve. Emotions do at least four different things. First they lead to action. When you have an emotional response, you tend to always have a tendency or a realized change in behavior. Second, emotions tend to change your cognition, the way in which you perceive the world. Third, emotions tend to be social vehicles for communicating how we feel to other people. And finally, emotions tend to also be heuristics, autopilot responses. Let's look at a tentative model for the relationship between emotions and feelings. As we've seen this model. An event starts to happen. Then you have an emotional response to that. And at the same time as you feel, you get a conscious feeling about something, you also have the action or the response to that event. So, for example, if you're watching a horror movie, and something exciting happens. Well, at the same time that you have the experience of being fearful your body has already responded. Lets look at a few brain regions that are associated with emotions and feelings. For example, the amygdala, this part of the brain has been long known to be involved in emotional responses. For a long time, it was suspected to be only involved in fear, and stress, and negative emotions. But now we know that it's also involved in positive emotions. The same thing goes for the basal ganglia, all the nucleus accumbens, for example. This region has long been thought to be a reward center of the brain. But now we also know that this part of the brain is also involved in negative emotions. The insula has long been implicated in emotions, in particular negative emotions such as aversion and disgust. But now we also know that it's involved in positive emotions as well. Finally, the orbital frontal cortex has been implicated in hedonic experience. So that means our pleasure experience of the world. It ranges from music, taste and odors. If we want to assess and measure these different processes, we can think about three different steps we need to measure, the emotional responses, the actions that are associated with the emotions. And finally, the feelings that people have accompanying those emotional responses. And we have listed here a few of those measurements that we can use. Let's run up with a task for you. If you look at the screen. You can see that we've made the Emotion matrix. This is a matrix that consists of three different dimensions on which we can rank and rate the different emotional responses that people have. The first dimension is the Valence dimension. Here we are ranking people's emotional responses to from negative to positive. The second dimension is the sentience dimension. Here we are thinking about whether people have an unconscious response or a fully blown conscious experience of the emotion response. And finally according to the consumed neuroscience model, we can also think about three different steps. Whether emotions are related to the prediction of something, the experience of something, or the learning of something. Let's take a particular example. Think about going to a restaurant and ordering your favorite dish of food. At the time you have ordered the food, you are looking forward to receiving the meal. This is the predictive value. It's positive, and it's both conscious and unconscious. When you received the food, you're either enjoying the food or you're disappointed by the food. So that would be the experienced value. And it could be positive or negative, and it could be conscious, typically. And finally, from that experience, and from your prediction, either being confirmed or violated, you learn something new. So that will be the learning stage, and this could be positive or negative, and it could be conscious or unconscious. And when we talk about motivation, we are talking about two different motivational systems. Wanting and liking. But before doing that let's focus on a definition of preferences. What is a preference? It's an individuals attitude towards a set of objects, typically reflected in an explicit decision making process. It can also be an evaluative judgment in the sense of liking or disliking an object, and preferences can be notably modified by decision making processes. We need to distinguish between liking and wanting. Liking is a person's hedonic experience. And we can assess it and measure it through what people say, explicit preference statements. Wanting on the other hand, is what people can't say explicitly. We can measure it through increased or changes in work and effort. Changes in eye fixations, behavioral change, mental preoccupation, or changes in arousal. When we look at the brain, we also see that wanting and liking are two different systems in the brain. We see that the wanting system is reflected in changes in activation such as the basal ganglia and the nucleus accumbens, for example. While our changes in our liking and our preference, the conscious preference is reflected in the changes in activation of the orbital frontal cortex. They're two different systems in the brain. Now let's take an example from real life, where we tested 100 people from a nationwide sample in the US. All these people were exposed to several ads. And we're just going to look at one particular ad and how they responded with their motivation response, or the so-called wanting response. Now let's look at two different studies. One performed by Brian Knudsen at Stanford University, and one performed here at the Copenhagen Business School. In the study by Brian Knudsen and colleagues, participants were put into an FMRI scanning session, while they were making different choices. They were given money before going into the scanner. And they were given different options to buy products. First, they saw the product, then they were given the price of the product and finally, they had the option to buy the product for the money or save the money. What the researchers did then, was to go back to the original data when people looked at these products and see. Whether they could predict what people will buy, just by looking th, at their brain scan. What they found was that, brain activation of a particular part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens or ventral striatum, predict the choice. Stronger activation of this region, when people looked at the product, predicted the likelihood that people were going to buy the product. The second phase was the price phase. Here they found that increased price was associated with stronger activation of the insula and, also, lower likelihood of purchase. And this was still four to eight seconds before making their choice. So based on this model, researchers were able to predict choice several seconds before people felt like, or actually executed, a product choice. Instead of looking at the ventral striatum activation we looked at what's called the prefrontal asymmetry index. So this is the relative engagement of the frontal left versus frontal right brain. This is an indication of motivation, or even wanting or approach avoidance, as we call it. In this study, people were also exposed to products, several seconds before they made up their minds. And they were imbued with money that they could use during the experiments. What we found, was that at the time that people saw the products, the higher the motivation index was, the more people were paying for the product. So in this sense, it's as if the brain is making up its mind several seconds before people are consciously making up their minds. And this is the root of why we are studying the brain basis of consumer choice. And this concludes the session about emotions and feelings and motivation. And as you can see, we now know a bit more about what drives consumer choice, both consciously and unconsciously. Next week we're going to talk about learning and memory. And I'll look forward to see you then.
