Emotion and decision-making explained: a précis.

Emotion and Decision-Making Explained aims to explain and advance understanding of emotion and decision-making at two levels of explanation. One is the proximate, mechanistic level of explanation, in terms of brain mechanisms. In terms of decision-making, this results in emphasis on biologically plausible integrate-and-fire models of the attractor neuronal network processes that underlie decision-making, rather than the phenomenological models such as the driftdiffusion model, although these phenomenological models of decision-making are covered in Appendix B. The second is the ultimate level of explanation, the level of adaptive value in evolution, in which emotion is explained as an efficient and simple way for genes to influence behaviour for their own ‘selfish’ reproductive success, by specifying the rewarding and punishing goals for instrumental actions, with the resulting states when the rewards or punishers are or are not obtained being emotional states (Chapters 2 and 3). This is simpler and more efficient in terms of evolutionary adaptive value than for genes to specify the details of the actions, the behavioural responses, to be produced by stimuli. A further aim of Emotion and Decision-Making Explained is to produce a unifying approach to emotion and neuroeconomics, which are both concerned with the valuation of rewards and punishers, and to link these valuation processes to how decisions are then made based on the valuations. Emotions are defined in this book as states elicited by rewards and punishers, that is, by instrumental reinforcers, which are the goals for action. The concept is that almost any action can be performed to obtain the goal. A goal might be for example obtaining the taste of a delicious food or a