Emotion and decision-making explained: response to commentators.

One of the themes of Emotion and Decision-Making Explained (Rolls, 2014c) is that there are multiple routes to emotionrelated responses, with some illustrated in Fig. 1. Brain systems involved in decoding stimuli in terms of whether they are instrumental reinforcers so that goal directed actions may be performed to obtain or avoid the stimuli are emphasized as being important for emotional states, for an intervening state may be needed to bridge the time gap between the decoding of a goal-directed stimulus, and the actions that may need to be set into train and directed to obtain or avoid the emotionrelated stimulus. In contrast, when unconditioned or classically conditioned responses such as autonomic responses, freezing, turning away etc. are required, there is no need for intervening states such as emotional states. These points are covered in Chapters 2e4 and 10 of the book. Ono and Nishijo (2014) raise the issue of the extent to which subcortical pathways are involved in the elicitation of some of these emotion-related responses. They describe interesting research that pulvinar neurons in macaques may respond to snakes, and may provide a route that does not