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		The Wisdom of the Gut Research takes a look inside the emotional brain. By David DeSteno Anger. Love. Joy. Jealousy. These emotions and their myriad brethren—very familiar to us on one level—are also very enigmatic. Most of us can describe our feelings of sorrow, or embarrassment, or pride. But we discover the limits of our understanding when we wonder how these emotional states affect us, or what their origins and functions are. For centuries, such questions were the province of artists and philosophers, not scientists. Even those working to categorize and quantify the functions of the human mind didn’t look at emotions. At best, emotions were seen as useless vestiges of our evolutionary past. At worst, they were phenomena that inhibited our mental functioning. If the ideal human brain relied solely on logical processing, “emotional baggage” was an unfortunate limitation. Over the past fifteen years or so, however, this view has begun to change. Emotions, once relegated to the scientific junk heap, are now considered a central—even integral—part of the mind, and researchers study them for new insight into how the mind works. At Northeastern’s Emotion, Cognition, and Social Behavior Lab, my students and I are attempting to further that effort by mapping the intimate and intricate links between emotions and thought. Consider this. Why is Captain Kirk—not Mr. Spock—the go-to guy whenever the Enterprise gets into trouble? How are expert gamblers and chess masters able to outperform powerful computers programmed to play games? The answer, many believe, lies in the gut. Not the digestive track, mind you, but in the judgment known as a “gut feeling.” Though a clear definition is hard to come by, a gut feeling is most likely a subtle emotional response that follows the human emotional system’s quick appraisal of a situation. Research has shown that our brains do, in fact, make rapid emotional assessments of the objects and events we encounter. If one of these assessments occurs outside our conscious awareness—which is often the case—the resulting sensation is usually described as a gut feeling, because we’re not quite sure of its origin. And yet it can exert a strong influence on our behavior. In recent studies, researcher Antoine Bechara and his colleagues asked participants to play a game that involved choosing cards from several decks. Unbeknownst to the players, the decks had been rigged to provide either modest payoffs and losses, or large payoffs and losses. The researchers found that as the participants played, they quickly formed hunches about which deck to use. That is, their bodies registered increased arousal if they reached to draw from a risky deck. Though they could not say why they made the choices they did, players rapidly learned to act on these emotional cues and draw from the less risky decks. After playing for longer periods, participants were able to understand and verbally report on the differences among the decks. However, their emotional responses had served as a much earlier and more sensitive guide to success. But what happened to the players who could not or did not use this emotional information? They fared poorly in the game; like Mr. Spock, they were hampered by an information deficit. This finding is reinforced by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s research, which showed that individuals with damage to areas of the brain important to the experience of emotion have difficulties with decision making and social conduct. Today, many psychologists believe emotion is a mental mechanism, sculpted by human evolution and social norms, that occurs in response to an environmental challenge and motivates adaptive behavior. For example, anger motivates thoughts and actions aimed at overcoming a barrier or a competitor. Fear motivates thoughts and actions aimed at avoiding a danger. Jealousy motivates thoughts and actions designed to safeguard a valued relationship. At the Emotion, Cognition, and Social Behavior Lab, we use this perspective to investigate the influence of emotion on social processes. For instance, we’ve explored the role of anger in the formation of automatic prejudice—negative evaluations that occur immediately and spontaneously when a member of a different social group is encountered. We sought to determine whether the experience of anger makes individuals more inclined to feel automatic prejudice—a negative gut reaction—toward a member of a novel group (a different ethnic group, for instance, or even a different social club). To examine this hypothesis, we induced different emotional states in our participants, all Northeastern undergraduates, by asking them to describe events from their past that corresponded to the emotion we wanted to evoke. We also asked them to complete a bogus personality test that “classified” them as members of a particular social group. Then we measured their automatic prejudice by giving them a computerized task in which they quickly categorized images of other in-group and out-group members. Only those participants who had been induced to feel anger showed a strong automatic prejudice toward out-group members. They had interpreted the anger they felt as a sign—a gut reaction—that an out-group member represented a real danger. No other participants perceived out-group members in a negative light. In essence, the arousal of anger had created a prejudice out of nowhere. To understand the implications of this finding, think about the police officer who has to make a split-second decision about the suspect she is chasing. If she is angry and if the suspect is a member of a group she perceives as an out-group, as he turns toward her with his hand in his pocket she will likely act aggressively toward him. This might not be the case if the suspect were a member of an in-group—or if the cop were not angry. Our work at the lab also focuses on how emotions influence our expectations. In another study, we induced different emotions in participants, then asked them to estimate the likelihood that certain events would occur in the future. We found that emotions make events possessing similar emotional overtones appear more likely. Angry individuals thought it more likely they would get stuck in a traffic jam later that day. Sad individuals believed it more likely a loved one would die in the coming year. Here again, people used their emotional states as information about what was likely to happen. So do emotions help us adapt to our environments? It depends on whether an emotion is relevant to the judgment at hand. When you walk home late at night and feel a bit frightened, your heightened expectations of harm function to make you more cautious—an adaptive response. But suppose in the midst of feeling incredibly happy about a job promotion you decide you don’t need to schedule your annual cancer screening. Your happiness has reduced your expectation of developing cancer and lessened your inclination to take a precaution. Emotions function in beneficial ways more often than not—that’s why evolution has preserved our capacity to experience them. Yet like most good things, they can lead us astray when used inappropriately. One trick to using your emotions intelligently is to consider their source. If an emotion stems from some earlier, irrelevant experience, don’t give it too much credence; it may blind you to what’s really happening. But if the source is relevant to the judgment you’re making, then trust your gut. It may know more than you do. David DeSteno is an assistant professor of psychology.From the edge of the forest, a half-hour’s hike from base camp through maize and bean fields, there is only another thirty minutes of steep climb through dense bamboo. When we arrive, we hand our backpacks to the trackers who will remain behind with the jungle-fatigued soldiers lugging automatic weapons.