Body,Feeling And Decision

For the first half of the twentieth century, psychology was content to view its human subject matter as little more than a stimulus-response machine, on account of the dominance of behaviourism. After that, through the cognitive revolution, most researcher replace the S-R machine with the Turing machine. Even though cognition was once more back on the agenda it was assumed that it could be modelled by sym-bolic logic and represented in any (computational) medium.It was only in the wake of the failure of the classical Al programme that cogni-tive science returned to naturalism-the study of cognition as implemented in the species homo sapiens, rather than some hypostatised abstraction. The focus of attention shifted from mathematical logic to neuroscience and evolutionary biology. The research of emotion was also affected by the shift, Damasio’s embodied view of emotion is also deliberated through the two approach.Recently, the contructive influence of emotion on the cognition processes abstracted focuses of researchers, especially, emotion affecting decision making, and varies of emotion and decision making theory emerging. Before very long period of time, emotion was considered as an obstacle that should be overcome for pursuit of pure reason. Nowadays, however, it has been been widely recognized as the key link in the process of decision making. The emotion theory of Antonio R. Damasio is one of these kinds of emotion theories.This paper analyzes the emotion and decision making theory of Antonio Damasio. In order to put the numerous and jumbled emotion theory into a logical frame, this paper has three part, respectively elaborate the relationship between emotion and body, emotion and feeling, emotion and decision making. At first, based on embodied of emotion, Damasio redefined the concept of emotion, and attempted to find its Neuroscience foundation. Second, Damasio consider subjective feelings, including the feeling of body and emotional experience, consisted of two mental profile, the feeling caused by stimulation and the accompanying emotion. For this reason, we should bring feeling, especially the feeling of emotion into the ambit of discussion, when analyze Damasio’s emotion theory. The last part is the somatic marker hypothesis. Through observing the patients who damaged the perfrontal cortex and making a series of related experiments, Damasio claimed that the damage of the perfrontal cortex not only can harm the integrity of the ability of basic intelligence, memory and inference, but also destroy the ability of experiencing of emotion. For emotion was viewed as associated with our ability of make predictions, thus this cerebral injury obstructs individuals to make rational decisions.