Hedonics

Oliver Edwards

            I noticed a very strong connection, both between the readings for the last two weeks, and between this subject matter and that of my conference project. In studying the neural substrates of addiction and their correlative explanations in the realm of philosophy and neuroeconomical theory, I have come to some interesting but slightly chilly conclusions. Much of what governs what we ‘want’, and thus how we behave, is severely detached from what gives us pleasure and from how we want to behave. I think Berridge and Robinson, two authors who have provided much of my conference material, do a very nice job of outlining this somewhat counter-intuitive notion. First of all, they have to demonstrate that it is possible to experience an unconscious, or implicit, emotion.

            Beginning, as we did in our own course, with James, Berridge questions the Jamesian assertion that all emotions are consciously felt. He runs us through a series of arguments that support the notion that unconscious emotions do not exist. He then proceeds, however, to demonstrate through an elegantly simple experiment, that our affective states can indeed change our behavior without conscious awareness. I had trouble with the experiment at first, but have decided that I think he makes his point quite strongly. The subliminal exposure to happy faces seems to have undeniably caused a Jamesian, physiological, change in the body that, although not explicitly recognized by the subject, subsequently changed the subject’s behavior. I wonder, was everyone else convinced as strongly as I was by the experiment?

In the end, Berridge gives James the credit he deserves by recognizing that James perhaps just had a different definition of emotion. He was referring more specifically to the ‘feeling’ of emotion, a distinction that we have learned to make over and over throughout our course discussions. More and more, with the advent of much more sophisticated understanding of the neural substrates of ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’, we need to examine the many facets of hedonics and ‘parse’ them out as Berridge says. He stresses that there are at least three psychological processes involved in hedonics: learning, subjective pleasure, and the motivation to act. Though we normally conflate the three, Berridge demonstrates well the need to understand them separately. Perhaps understanding the neural substrates of the three, something we cannot quite do in detail yet, will contribute to a more clear-cut distinction in our minds.

 

I found the article on perceived hedonic duration fascinating, but also shocking in a way I don’t quite understand. It demonstrated in a more concrete, everyday manner, the phenomenon that Berridge describes. In much of our daily lives, especially in the social realm, we are governed by our implicit desires and motivations. I think much of the inadequacy some of us have felt in attempting to describe emotions like love speaks to this phenomenon. Why are we more likely to forgive those that we love. While the study seems to demonstrate that they hurt us less because we love them, couldn’t it also be that we ignore the hurt because implicitly we ‘want’ them even when we don’t love them.

We also see a similar phenomenon in the two discussions of optimism. While instinctually we all probably feel that optimism is the healthy, beneficial response to all of life’s variegated situations, the first paper especially demonstrated that is common and also beneficial for a person to become more pessimistic directly before an expected event. This shed a lot of light for me on the question of why these implicit emotional responses seem to be evolutionarily selected. Do we have a prejudice towards conscious emotions simply because we are aware that they give us pleasure. Just as we have seen with LeDoux’s assessment of fear responses, organisms may need to experience ‘wanting’ subconsciously simply because it is more efficient. Similarly, although pessimism is certainly unpleasant, it may cause us to behave advantageously in certain situations. It is sometimes disturbing, especially in the field of addiction research, to think how strongly our drives and pleasures may be below the surface of our conscious awareness.