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The Brain, Emotion and Depression
Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198832249
What produces emotions?
Why do we
have emotions? How do we have emotions? Why do emotional states feel
like
something? What is the relation between emotion, reward value, and
subjective
feelings of pleasure? How is the value of a good represented in the
brain? Will neuroeconomics
replace classical microeconomics? How does the brain implement
decision-making?
Are gene-defined rewards and emotions in the interests of the genes?
Does rational multistep planning
enable us to go beyond selfish genes to plans in the interests of
the individual? This book seeks
explanations of emotion and decision-making by considering these
questions.
The
Brain, Emotion, and
Depression provides a unified approach to emotion, reward value,
economic value, and
decision-making, and their brain mechanisms. The evolutionary, adaptive
value of the processes involved
in emotion, the neural networks involved in emotion and
decision-making, and the issue of conscious
emotional feelings are all considered.
The book will
be valuable for
those in the fields of neuroscience, neurology, psychology, psychiatry,
biology, animal
behaviour, economics, and philosophy from the advanced undergraduate
level upwards, and for all interested in emotion, decision-making, and
depression, including non-specialists for whom there are special
sections of the book.
The
topics covered include:
The nature of emotion, and a theory of emotion
The functions of
emotion, including a Darwinian theory of the adaptive value of emotion,
which helps to illuminate many aspects of brain design and behaviour
The brain mechanisms of emotion
Affective states and motivated behaviour: hunger and sexual behaviour
The pharmacology of emotion, and brain mechanisms for action
Decision-making
Depression
Emotional
feelings, and consciousness
The front cover shows part of the picture Ulysses and the Sirens painted in
1891 by John William Waterhouse. The metaphor relevant to understanding
emotion is the rational conscious brain system in Ulysses resisting the
gene-based emotion-related attractors, the sirens, by asking to be tied
to the mast.
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