Emotion and personality
Some weeks ago, I attended the last Advanced Research Seminar of the Leadership Development Research Centre (GLEAD) at ESADE. The issue presented was Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypotheses (SMH). The presentation started with the well-known case of Phineas Gage.
I was intrigued by the story, so I began to read about reaching some exciting points.
Phineas Gage is probably the most famous case of a person who has survived severe damage to the brain. On September 13, 1848, he was working on constructing the railroad outside the town of Cavendish, Vermont. He was using a tamping iron to compact the sand that covered explosives put into the holes made in the rocks. Perhaps because the sand was forgotten, he provoked an explosion that projected the instrument through his head, entering on the side of his face, passing the back of the left eye, and going out at the top of the head through the frontal lobe (See video).
Phineas not only survived the accident but also, from the beginning, he seemed to maintain intact his intellectual capabilities and not feel pain. He recovered both mentally and physically, but his personality was changed. His character became irregular, irreverent and rude, showing little respect for their fellow human beings. Also, he had become impatient and stubborn but capricious and hesitant at once.
Linking emotions, personality, and areas of the brain
The mentioned Somatic Marker Hypothesis of Damasio is argued under the assumption that somatic markers provide a signal delineating which current events have had emotion-related consequences in the past. Consequently, they guide the decision-making process in complex and unpredictable environments. It belongs to the field of Affective Neuroscience, a discipline concerned with the underlying neural substrates of emotion and mood. In this area, the Limbic System is a more broadly supported anatomic model. It was proposed by Paul McLean in 1949, and even though it has been criticised on both empirical and theoretical grounds, it remains the dominant conceptualisation of the “emotional brain” today. MacLean viewed the brain as a triune architecture consisting of three interacting systems. The reptilian brain is the most ancient and responsible for primitive emotions such as aggression and fear. The “old” mammalian brain elaborates on social emotions. The “new” mammalian brain, or neocortex, represents the interface of emotion with cognition and is the seat of top-down control over emotional responses originating within other systems (Dalgleish, Dunn, and Mobbs 2009).
Cases such as the Phineas Gage, where the ventromedial region of the frontal lobe is damaged, show that even though intellectual capabilities remain, there are consequences that produce emotional inability and inappropriate social behaviour.
There is an interdisciplinary field of research between Affective Neuroscience and Social Psychology called Social Affective Neuroscience that seeks to understand phenomena in terms of interactions between three levels of analysis: the social level, which is concerned with the motivational and social factors that influence behaviour and experience; the cognitive level, which is concerned too with the information-processing mechanisms; and the neural level, which is concerned with the brain mechanisms (Ochsner and Lieberman 2001).
Conclusion
Following the present line of arguments, we have to differentiate between emotions and feelings, being the first, body states related to non-rational processes generated in the subcortical structures. They would be basic mechanisms that respond to stimuli in an innate way. The feelings will relate the emotion with the object that excites it, gaining consciousness of the emotion through rational processes at the cortical level. Thus, we have innate and preorganised primary emotions that depend on the limbic system and secondary emotions. These occur once we begin experiencing feelings and forming systematic connections between categories of objects and situations, on one hand, and primary emotions, on the other (Damasio 2006).
At this point, we should distinguish between the basic and nonbasic emotions built using the first as if they were building blocks. Even though there is the assumption that a small set of basic emotions exists, theorists disagree on how many or which they are. Nevertheless, nearly everybody includes anger, happiness, sadness and fear (Ortony and Turner 1990).
Finally, we see why Phineas Gage, despite having recovered physically, was never the same again. The damage caused prevented him basic emotions needed to evaluate daily situations and to relate with others. His personality changed forever.
References
- Dalgleish, T., Dunn, B. D., & Mobbs, D. (2009). Affective Neuroscience: Past, Present, and Future. Emotion Review, 1(4), 355–368. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073909338307
- Damasio, A. (2006). Descartes’ error : emotion, reason and the human brain. London: Vintage.
- Ochsner, K. N., & Lieberman, M. D. (2001). The emergence of social cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, 56(9), 717–734. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.9.717.
Ortony, A., & Turner, T. J. (1990). What’s basic about basic emotions. Psychological Review, 97(3), 315–331.
