Decision making

 

Kahneman and Tversky suggested in their Prospect theory that humans make irrational decisions. Recently, several high impact functional imaging studies showed that emotional processes in the brain are involved in such processes. One problem with these studies is that they are correlational and cannot say anything about causality - do some emotional processes impact our decisions so they become irrational? In order to get closer to the causality issue we were able to show that subjects became more rational when we blocked their amygdala driven emotional reactivity pharmacologically (Gospic et al Plos Biology 2014). Together with professor Martin Ingvar we are continuing the work to understand the relationsship between emotion and decision. Apart from this line of reserach earlier cooperation has focused on unconscious reward learning in the human brain (Pessiglione et al Neuron 2008).