A Mind of Its Own

by Cordelia Fine

  27 For a brief review of the ‘Illusions of control’ and when it occurs, see S.C. Thompson (1999), ‘Illusions of control: how we overestimate our personal control’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8: 187–90.

  28 P.M. Biner, S.T. Angle, J.H. Park, A.E. Mellinger and B.C. Barber (1995), ‘Need and the illusion of control’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21: 899–907.

  29 For example, see E. Babad (1997), ‘Wishful thinking among voters: motivational and cognitive influences’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 9: 105–25.

  30 E. Babad and Y. Katz (1991), ‘Wishful thinking – against all odds’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 21: 1921–38.

  31 C.J. Uhlaner and B. Grofman (1986), ‘The race may be close but my horse is going to win: Wish fulfillment in the 1980 presidential election’, Political Behavior, 8: 101–29.

  32 E. Babad (1997), ‘Wishful thinking among voters: motivational and cognitive influences’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 9: 105–25.

  33 P.C. Price (2000), ‘Wishful thinking in the prediction of competitive outcomes’, Thinking and Reasoning, 6: 161–72.

  34 S. E. Taylor and J.D. Brown (1988), ‘Illusion and well-being: a social psychological perspective on mental health’, Psychological Bulletin, 103: 193–210.

  35 For a readable account of Martin Seligman’s research on explanatory style, see R. J. Trotter (1987), ‘Stop blaming yourself’, Psychology Today, 21: 31–9.

  36 D.D. Danner, D.A. Snowdon and W.V. Friesen (2001), ‘Positive emotions in early life and longevity: findings from the nun study’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80: 804–13.

  37 From comparing the lowest and highest quartiles on number of positive emotion words, and number of different positive emotions expressed in the passage.

  38 B. L. Fredrickson and R.W. Levenson (1998), ‘Positive emotions speed recovery from the cardiovascular sequelae of negative emotions’, Cognition and Emotion, 12: 191–220.

  39 S.C. Segerstrom, S. E. Taylor, M.E. Kemeny and J. J. Fahey (1998), ‘Optimism is associated with mood, coping, and immune change in response to stress’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74: 1646–55.

  40 See C.R. Snyder and R.L. Higgins (1988), ‘Excuses: their effective role in the negotiation of reality’, Psychological Bulletin, 104: 23–35.

  41 R. Buehler, D. Griffin and M. Ross (1994), ‘Exploring the “Planning Fallacy”: why people underestimate their task completion times’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67: 366–81.

  42 M. Fenton-O’Creeny, N. Nicholson, E. Soane and P. Willman (2003), ‘Trading on illusions: Unrealistic perceptions of control and trading performance’, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 76: 53–68.

  43 Salary decrease referred to in text refers to the effect on annual remuneration of one standard deviation change in ‘illusion of control’ score, according to the regression coefficient.

  44 As assessed using questionnaire measures. S. E. Taylor and P.M. Gollwitzer (1995), ‘Effects of mindset on positive illusions’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69: 213–26. And P.M. Gollwitzer and R.F. Kinney (1989), ‘Effects of deliberative and implemental mind-sets on illusion of control’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56: 531–42.

  45 See S. E. Taylor and J.D. Brown (1988), ‘Illusion and well-being: a social psychological perspective on mental health’, Psychological Bulletin, 103: 193–210.

  46 R.K. Deppe and J.M. Harackiewicz (1996), ‘Self-handicapping and intrinsic motivation: buffering intrinsic motivation from the threat of failure’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70: 868–76.

  47 C.S. Dweck (1975), ‘The role of expectations and attributions in the alleviation of learned helplessness’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31: 674–85; M. Chapin and D.G. Dyck (1976), ‘Persistence in children’s reading behavior as a function of N length and attribution retraining’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 85: 511–15.

  48 T.D. Wilson and P.W. Linville (1985), ‘Improving the performance of college freshmen with attributional techniques’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49: 287–93.

  49 T. Pyszczynski, J. Greenberg, S. Solomon, J. Arndt and J. Schimel (2004), ‘Why do people need self-esteem? A theoretical and empirical review’, Psychological Bulletin, 130: 435–68.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Emotional Brain

  Sweaty fingers in all the pies

  My son, thirteen months old, is crying as if his heart will break. He sobs with his entire body, and I know that in a few seconds he will assume what my husband and I call ‘The Tragedy Pose’. Sure enough, soon he collapses onto the floor and flops forward so that his forehead hits the carpet. I am holding in my hand the accomplice to the act that has obliterated all joy from my son’s existence. This object and I, between us, have left no other course available to my young child but to give himself over completely to unmitigated, carpet-drenching grief. I struggle painfully but successfully with the urge to ruin his character forever by returning to him this item upon which, clearly, his entire happiness depends. It is a ballpoint pen.

  As it happens, I know just how it feels to have ballpoint pens taken away. My husband, as part of his Stationery Stationing System, has strategically located pens at three key note-making points around the house: clipped onto the calendar; by the phone; and in the travel wallet. According to the System, these pens should only ever be removed from their posts to be used for, respectively, noting events on the calendar, taking down phone messages and filling in travel-related documents. My husband is quite strict in his enforcement of this rule, and any pen found being used for a purpose other than that intended is immediately returned to its sentry-post.

  And irritating though it is to have a writing implement removed mid-word, I simply do not seem to feel the loss as keenly as does my son. For this I have my prefrontal cortex to thank. A mere smudge of brain cells at birth, it takes twenty-odd years or more to reach its full stature as the sergeant major of the adult brain. One of the many jobs of the prefrontal cortex is to regulate the emotional responses of less civilised brain regions, which is why it’s such a useful thing to have. While earning my PhD, I studied a man who had damaged part of his prefrontal cortex in a car accident. Because he had a little problem with his temper (he liked to let a blunt instrument do his arguing for him), he had been removed to a high-security psychiatric hospital for the safety of all. I made the mistake of reading his case-notes just before meeting him and I felt deeply nervous as to how the two of us would hit it off. Unfortunately, when I am anxious my palms become unpleasantly sweaty. As I began to shake hands with the patient, he rapidly withdrew his own with an expression of the utmost disgust, and ostentatiously wiped it on his trousers.

  ‘Christ!’ he remarked to my supervisor, who was relishing every moment. ‘It’s like shaking hands with a wet haddock.’

  Had his prefrontal cortex been intact and doing its job, I have no doubt that he would have kept this observation to himself.

  There is little doubt that, compared with the toddler or the uninhibited brain-damaged patient, we display a truly authoritative control of our emotions. Nonetheless, it is also the case that our emotions and moods enjoy an impressive mastery of us. It may seem, as we busily go about our lives – deciding what actions are best taken for the future, casting our beady eye over people and events around us and passing judgment on them, or reflecting on the past – that we are making good use of our uniquely human powers of rationality. However, research suggests that it is often our emotions that are actually wearing the pants. Our emotion’s sweaty fingers fiddle with our psychological world at every level: from the seemingly straightforward issue of what we perceive in the world around us, to the rich and complex sense of ‘me-ness’ in the world within us.

  Unlike a cow, say, whose alternatives for action are to munch on this little patch of grass, or tha
t little patch of grass, we humans have some labyrinthine decisions to make in our lives. One of the hottest new topics in psychology is the clout our emotions wield over our choices – even those that we might be tempted to think require impressively intellectual calculations and calibrations. The experiment that sparked off this interest in the power of feelings used a gambling game as a laboratory simulation of the complex and uncertain mix of risks and benefits that our everyday choices bring. The researchers asked volunteers to select cards, over and over, from any of the four decks in front of them.1 They weren’t given much information about the decks, just that some worked out better than others. When they turned over a card they learnt whether they had won or lost points. Two of the decks yielded high point gains but, every so often, very severe point losses. This meant that, overall, these packs were best avoided. The other two packs were actually more beneficial in the long run; they offered less dazzling point wins, but less devastating point losses. While the volunteers played the game, the researchers monitored their emotional responses. They did this by measuring their skin conductance response – the polite way of referring to how much someone is sweating. (Skin conductance equipment measures the electrical conductivity of skin, which is affected by the salt in sweat.)

  The pattern of winning and losing was too complicated for the volunteers to calculate which decks were the best. Yet by the end of the experiment, nearly all of the volunteers were choosing from the winning packs. They had developed hunches about which decks to avoid. This isn’t particularly remarkable in itself, but what was rather eerie was that the volunteers’ sweaty fingers seemed to work out which decks to avoid before the volunteers themselves did. In the pre-hunch stage, while the volunteers were still choosing cards haphazardly, their skin conductance responses would shoot up just before they chose a card from a losing deck. Only after the volunteers started showing these warning emotional jolts did they develop their gut feeling that they should avoid those decks.

  The authority that these gut feelings have over our behaviour became clear when the researchers gave the same gambling game to a patient with damage to part of the prefrontal cortex (the ventro-medial prefrontal lobe). This man, known as EVR, had been a happy and successful businessman, husband and father until a brain tumour developed in part of his prefrontal cortex and had to be removed. Soon after, EVR’s professional and personal life went to rack and ruin because of an extraordinary inability to make decisions.2 The simplest purchases – which razor to buy? what brand of shampoo? – required exhaustive comparisons of price and quality. And you could faint from hunger waiting for him to decide at which restaurant to eat. He would begin with an extensive discussion of each restaurant’s seating plan, details of its menu, its atmosphere and its management. Then the field work would begin, in the form of drive-by inspections to see how busy each restaurant was. Yet even after all this research, EVR still found it impossible to choose. EVR’s pathological vacillation was so time-consuming that it placed a terminal strain on both his marriage and his employment. And when he did manage to make decisions, they were generally bad ones. Despite numerous warnings from others that he was making a terrible mistake, this once shrewd businessman invested all his savings in a home-building business with a partner of dubious commercial and moral credentials, and went bankrupt.

  What was so odd about EVR’s condition – and what made it so hard to understand why his post-surgery life was so disastrous – was that his intellect was completely unaffected by his brain injury. The researchers studying him chatted with him for hours about current affairs, politics and ethics, and were unfailingly impressed with his intelligence and knowledge. They quizzed him too on hypothetical social dilemmas, asking him what a person could and should do in tricky social situations. EVR had no trouble in coming up with a whole range of sensible solutions to these problems even though – as he himself cheerfully admitted – he wouldn’t have a clue what to decide to do if he ended up in those situations himself.3

  In fact, it was partly this strange unconcern about his problems that triggered the researchers’ suspicions that EVR’s failing might be an emotional one. Nothing seemed to touch him emotionally, and this was confirmed by an experiment showing that EVR (and other patients like him) didn’t show normal skin conductance increases to emotionally charged pictures (such as scenes of mayhem, mutilation and nudity).4 Could it be that this emotional lack was behind EVR’s debilitating incapacity to make decisions? The researchers investigated this idea using their gambling game, monitoring the skin conductance responses of EVR and other similar patients while they played. In the game, as in life, the patients made poor decisions, never learning to avoid the ‘bad’ decks. This was despite the fact that half of the patients even came to realise that the high-risk decks they were going for were bad news.5

  Why couldn’t the patients ‘solve’ the gambling task? Unlike the non-brain-damaged volunteers – who let off an emotional skin-conductance shudder right before choosing from a bad deck, even before they consciously began to suspect that those decks should be avoided – the patients showed no signs of building up this sort of emotional knowledge. The conclusion it is most tempting to draw is that these emotional tags (or somatic markers, as the researchers called them) guide our decision-making. Without these emotional tags, even the most encyclopedic knowledge or powerful intellect cannot help us to pluck a bottle of shampoo off the supermarket shelf.

  EVR’s chaotically indecisive life vividly demonstrates how disabling it is for us not to have our emotions available as input while we are weighing up our options. Yet using emotions as information brings its own peril – the danger of mistaking the cause of those emotions. If we misattribute our emotion to the wrong source – thinking it stems from some origin other than the one that is actually causing our surge of feeling – this error can be ‘carried forward’ to our judgments and decisions. Research suggests that this may happen rather more often than we realise.

  The problem is that our bodies seem to produce a ‘one size fits all’ emotional response. For a long time some psychologists had trouble accepting the idea that our hearts thump in pretty much the same way regardless of whether we’re in an exam, have just won the lottery or are running for a bus.6 These die-hard psychologists went to extraordinarily elaborate lengths in their attempts to show that the body responds differently to different emotions. And they spared no amount of emotional trauma in their volunteers along the way. (This was before the concept of ‘research ethics’, way back in the golden era of psychology when you could hurl an unsuspecting volunteer into the throes of a powerfully distressing emotion and then all have a laugh about it afterwards.) For example, a researcher with the suitably ominous name of Ax asked volunteers to lie down on a medical bed.7 He then attached them to a complicated tangle of electrodes and wires, and told them to relax. Once they were nice and comfy, unexpectedly, they began to feel electric shocks in their little finger. When they commented on this to the experimenter, he feigned surprise and twiddled a few knobs. Moments later, sparks began to fly across the wires and the experimenter, lab-coat flying with panic, exclaimed that there was a dangerous high voltage short circuit. The volunteer lay awaiting fatal electrocution for about five minutes while the experimenter flapped about creating ‘an atmosphere of alarm and confusion’, until he finally declared the short circuit repaired and the danger over.

  There was no doubt that Ax’s volunteers were genuinely scared. One volunteer remarked afterwards, ‘Well, everybody has to go some time. I thought this might be my time.’ Another prayed to God to be spared death. Yet despite the admirable success of Ax and others in inducing gut-wrenching emotions in their volunteers, it was all in vain. They failed to discover any interesting differences between the physiology of the volunteer trembling with terror and wondering whether his will is in order, and the volunteer about to, say, keel over dead from rage. It is the thoughts that go alongside your emotional arousal that enable you to distinguish between one
emotion and another. There’s no great mystery to human emotions. All you need to know is one simple equation:8

  EMOTION = AROUSAL + EMOTIONAL THOUGHTS

  Because the arousal is the same whatever the emotion – it varies only in intensity – your brain has the job of matching the arousal with the right thoughts. In fact, when it comes to emotions, your brain is a bit like a laundry assistant matching socks in a hurry before his tea break. When you have two socks that are bright blue with a cartoon dog on them, there’s no trouble matching them together. (My brain had little difficulty pairing finding myself confined in a small room with a dangerously uninhibited frontal lobe patient with my sweaty palms.) But when it comes to pairing up all those workaday socks that are only slightly different lengths, styles and hues of black, things get a bit trickier. And your brain isn’t all that careful. In lieu of a perfect match, it’s happy to snatch up any old black sock that looks about right. The consequence of this is that you attribute your arousal to the wrong thing.

  In one such experiment, researchers asked three groups of men to ride an exercise bike for long enough to build up a decent sheen of sweat.9 They were then given the arduous task of watching an erotic film, and reporting their level of sexual arousal. The first group of men watched and rated the film for its sexually invigorating nature long after they’d recovered from the exercise. Their brains didn’t have any problems because there were only two socks to match: the arousal from looking at naked women, and thoughts about the naked women. The second group of men viewed the film straight after exercising. Their brains weren’t fooled either. They easily matched the extra arousal with the exercise, and the arousal from the naked women with the thoughts about the naked women. But the last group saw the film a little while after the exercise. By this time, although the men were still physically aroused from the cycling, they weren’t aware of it. They had, as it were, lost a sock. This meant that they tidily paired up the arousal from the film and the arousal from the exercise bike with their thoughts about the film. As a result, they rated themselves as significantly more excited by the film than did the other two groups of men. Their emotional brains misled them about how erotic they had found the film. (You might want to bear this experiment in mind next time someone starts flirting with you at the water cooler in the gym: they may have read this book.)