creators_name: Barnes, Allison creators_name: Thagard, Paul type: confpaper datestamp: 1998-03-26 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:07 metadata_visibility: show title: Emotional Decisions ispublished: pub subjects: cog-psy subjects: phil-epist full_text_status: public abstract: Recent research has yielded an explosion of literature that establishes a strong connection between emotional and cognitive processes. Most notably, Antonio Damasio draws an intimate connection between emotion and cognition in practical decision making. Damasio presents a "somatic marker" hypothesis which explains how emotions are biologically indispensable to decisions. His research on patients with frontal lobe damage indicates that feelings normally accompany response options and operate as a biasing device to dictate choice. What Damasio's hypothesis lacks is a theoretical model of decision making which can advance the conceptual connection between emotional and cognitive decision making processes. In this paper we combine Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis with the coherence theory of decision put forward by Thagard and Millgram. The juxtaposition of Damasio's hypothesis with a cognitive theory of decision making leads to a new and better theory of emotional decisions. date: 1996 date_type: published publisher: Erlbaum pagerange: 426-429 refereed: TRUE citation: Barnes, Allison and Thagard, Paul (1996) Emotional Decisions. [Conference Paper] document_url: http://cogprints.org/619/1/Emot_Decis.html