The Powerful Role of Feelings In Decision Making
Neuroscience research, especially the research and thinking of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on FEELINGS, has contributed greatly to the development of the Bricklin/Elliot tests and tools. Research suggests that 95% of the choices, decisions and judgements of adults and children are more influenced by feelings than thoughts. People might have many thoughts about some particular choice, but the “select” button is a feeling. Every single thing we think, say, do, hear, write, desire, fear, create, learn, hate, decide, evaluate, remember, fantasize, plan, or dream of is obviously, or subtly, accompanied by a feeling. The way a child or adult FEELS about a choice, decision, or judgment is much more likely to be valid than what is said by that child or adult about the choice, decision, or judgment. This is true in any setting, and especially true in a forensic setting.
Feelings are based, in great part, on memories. A child’s feelings toward a parent, based on that child’s memories, more accurately represent the nature of his or her interactions with that parent than do the words a child might say about those interactions.
In the research literature, the terms “emotions” and “feelings” are almost always used interchangeably. Emotions are but one source of feelings. Inputs from our external senses, as well as inputs from our viscera, represented by homeostatic efficiency, also contribute to our feelings.
An emotion---which can affect our perceptions, attention, memory, judgment, and reasoning--- involves three very distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response. Ekman believes there are 13 emotional states: fear, disgust, anger, surprise, happiness, sadness, embarrassment, excitement, contempt, shame, pride, satisfaction, and amusement. In humans, an emotional state is launched by a cognitive appraisal. Emotional reactions are innate and automatic. Emotions evoke facial expressions, vocal expressions, changes in one’s body, felt experiences, readiness to act, and social inclinations.
Feelings are the subjective mental representations of an emotion. Bacteria manifested what we would call emotions 3.5 billion years ago. Feelings, as we know them, were not possible until creatures had nervous systems. This occurred about 600 million years ago. Humans showed up around 5 million years ago.
Feelings are based on inputs from our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, tongue, and hands, from proprioception and other internal senses like those in the viscera and from inner drives like sex and thirst, from thoughts and fantasies, and from our emotional reactions to all that life throws at us. It turns out that the phrase “gut feeling” is particularly critical because the viscera, affected by all of the other inputs just noted, become the primary biological source of our consciously experienced feelings, represented by the status of homeostatic efficiency.
Feelings are powerful and pervasive forces pushing human judgments and decisions. They influence thoughts, actions, feelings, attention, perception, the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information, as well as associative learning for children as well as adults.
Feelings all have valence, the degree to which they feel good to bad. They all manifest some degree of arousal---some degree of alertness, excitement, or engagement. They also manifest some degree of regulation---the degree to which any feeling can be controlled by willpower. The role of feelings is to motivate adaptive behaviors that contribute to the passing on of genes through survival, reproduction, and kin selection.
Contrary to the popular belief that feelings are generally bad for decision making, research has found that individuals who experience more intense feelings achieve higher decision-making performances. Antonio Damasio found that when humans damage the area of their brain where emotions are generated and processed, despite still being able to use logic and function in most areas, they make poor decisions in self-care, and struggle to make any decisions, even simple ones, like what to eat for lunch.