How does affect affect our cognitions, specifically the judgments we make?: Embodied cognition and embodied emotion

With this semester's Social Cognition seminar coming to a close, I will be posting some musings I had. There will be a few. Comments, criticism, inquiries, and academic discussion on these topics is undoubtedly encouraged.

Embodied cognition refers to the phenomenon in which our sensorimotor sensations and perceptions impact our cognitive processes (Fiske & Taylor). This implies that bottom-up processing of information can impact our judgments. 

Morality, in one function, can serve to prevent people from doing something that will hurt themselves or others. 

Many morality judgments respond to disgust (Haidt). It seems as though there is an inherent embodiment of certain behaviors that are disgusting, which in turn become moralized. That is, when stimuli invoke feelings of disgust, we feel the need to make a morality judgment towards that stimulus. 

For example, disgust can function to keep pathogens out of our bodies (rotting flesh of animals or decomposing fruits and vegetables), 

just as it functions to keep from incurring the genetic costs of inbreeding (incest avoidance; Lieberman). 

However, it seems that we don’t even need to fully embody the disgusting act to make a morality judgment; we can see someone engaging in a disgusting behavior and deem it immoral (e.g., bestiality). 

It’s interesting that this link between disgust and morality is so strong; do political conservatives not gag when they think of homosexual sex, just as they would gag when biting down on a rotten apple? (here's a softball of a study...)

any second now...they're gonna....do it.

Perhaps this gets at the root of embodied cognition at its purest. 

Our ability to feel empathy, to distort the divide between another person and our self, allows us to possess morality. With that same ability to empathize, we can actually sense, in our own body, the emotions being experienced by another, and disgust is just as vital of an emotion as pain in our moral compass. 

Embodied cognition, therefore embodied emotion, is sensorimotor input that affects our judgments, might be responsible for the morality that is unique to humans.   

inspired in part by: deWaal

Part 4 Consilience Conference 2012: A lowly graduate student's notes

These posts will not be in any discernible order; nor will they resemble the order of presentations during the conference. They will merely reflect what I found profoundly interesting and what presentations sparked future research endeavors. These thoughts will be poorly cited and eventually as time permits, I will fill in citations as I move along.

With that being said, if it seems as though I think my thoughts are original or of my own, when in fact someone already went there...it's not plagiarism. Its my daily life. Someone. Already. Did. It. In that case, comment with a citation or two.

Patricia Churchland

What are social instincts?

What genes take us from a reptilian brain to a mammalian brain?

Attachment and trust are our moral value center.

Social Problem Solving:
Our brains regulate, repress, calculate, plan, track reputations...
This problem solving is located in the PFC. There are deep connections to the deep (reptilian/Darwinian) brain.

"Deep value" is to ensure one's own survival; this is akin to the processing that occurs in the reptilian brain. "Mammalian value" is to ensure not only one's own survival, but the survival of others (especially offspring.)

In mammals, especially humans, a trade-off exists: a mother has to deliver a baby through a bony pelvis, so the brain needs to be relatively small at birth to accomplish this. This creates a large newborn dependence on its mother (sometimes even through graduate school....) in order to have brain mature to adult size. This immature brain of warm-blooded loco-motors must be able to adapt to a multitude of environments. So the benefits of having newborn dependence outweighs the costs.

Oxytocin promotes bonding, cooperation, mutual grooming, sex, and related reproductive behaviors. It also lowers cortisol and provides a calming effect. There is a decrease in defensive postures, increased level of trust, and autonomic arousal decreases. Dopamine also plays a key role in learning, if there is a block of dopamine, organisms fail to learn. 

This is when the magic happened:



Lack of parental investment --> underdeveloped PFC -->  low K lifestyle (FAST) --> low investment in offspring --> underdeveloped PFC --> low K lifestyle (FAST)

This cycle is perpetuated since individuals with an underdeveloped PFC do not feel the rewards that come from investing in their offspring: they find no pleasure in helping; consequently, they do not feel the pain when their offspring are in distress. They can't learn to parent. Their reward systems are not hardwired to invest in their offspring.

Do low K women have low endogenous oxytocin and/or dopamine, especially following childbirth?

There are many more unanswered questions, I will definitely be coming back to this post and updating.