That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Emotional Decision Making

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind how emotions affect our decision making. 

Hi, my name's Oliver Goldson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So, we're going to continue on with decision-making, and because we've got some gaps between these episodes, I thought I'd do a quick refresher just to get us on the same page, and then I'll dive in today's topic, emotional decision-making. Or at least, what is emotion and how does it fit into decision-making? decision-making. So we started with this concept of value and expected value and value is the

inherent worth of something to you or what economists would call the utility of something. Now, why this is important is this is the basis for our decisions. We tend to choose things with higher utility or value and we tend to not choose things with lower utility or value. And as I pointed out numerous times, this could apply to something similar. like food. We discussed my love affair for pizza. So if I have a choice between pizza and stir fry, I choose pizza because it has a higher value or utility to me. But it could also apply for complex things like, you know, what major do I want to take in school? I'm actually in Ontario visiting my son and he's trying to decide what to do and he's thinking astrophysics

and he's weighing that against some other choices. So right now astrophysics has the highest value for him, and that's what he chooses. And that led us into our second piece of decision making, which is a very simple model of decision making, which is always choose the highest value. And there you go. You know, you could be done. That's what you do. You just navigate the world and always choose the highest value. But then we discuss the concept of exploration versus exploitation. And the idea is simple. Sometimes you deliberately choose a lower value. And the reason you do this is because, one, you might be uncertain of the values of choices available to you. So you have to try something with an unknown value just to see what the value is. So you try a new pizza

restaurant you've never tried before, because it could be the best pizza you've ever had. or you actually deliberately choose a lower value option. Now, why would I do that? Why would I take a lower value option? Well, the answer is really simple. You take the lower value option quite simply because the world changes. You know, the restaurant that didn't have the best pizza might have fired the old cook and hired a new cook who's the best pizza chef in your hometown.

And as a result, you've got to sample the world. So that's exploration. Exploitation is the decision to choose the higher value. Now, how does the brain figure out when to explore and when to exploit? It's actually a very complicated problem. It goes down to basically certainty about the world. Typically, if you're uncertain about your environment, you might explore more, and if you are certain, you might explore less.

It also is individual. Some people naturally explore more. That's just how they're wired. Some people explore less. So there's a lot of factors that choose that exploration rate, and it's also not constant over time. For instance, when you first move to a new city, you might have a high exploration rate. But once you learn that city and you learn which pizza places are good and which ones are bad, you might dial down your exploration rate.

Okay. So there's decision making, we know everything. Nope, I brought in the concept of System 1 and System 2, these idea of gut hunch decisions and the idea of analytical decisions. If you think about this in terms of value, which is where I want to keep it today because it will afford us talking about emotional decision making, a gut hunch decision is basically just choosing the highest value option at that point in time.

That's really what it is. One way to think of System 2 is that's the system that does two things. One, it makes a decision to explore, which is analytical in nature itself, because you have to consciously say, you know what, I'm going to choose something else today. But it's also a time to assess values. So System 2 is reappraising values because your gut hunch assessment of value might be incorrect. So a system one decision is a simple way to think about it. It's your gut hunch. It's just choosing the highest value option, whereas a system two decision is basically a decision to explore

and or assessing the values in front of us. Okay, is that all you need to know about decision making? No, as humans, we are emotional creatures. Now, funnily enough, I don't think we've talked about the amygdala for a while, but guess what? We're going to talk about the amygdala. And it's not just the amygdala. The amygdala is a part of the brain involved in emotion, but there's a lot of other parts of the brain involved in emotion. There is the insular cortex. There are mid-brain structures.

And in fact, this is classically referred to as the limbic system. Now, I've mentioned this in the past. I'm not a big fan of the phrase limbic system, because a lot of models of the limbic system include things that are part of the cortex. But generally, you're talking about mid-brain structures. So the basal ganglia plays a role in emotion. the hippocampus plays a role in emotion. The thalamus and the hypothalamus play a role in emotion.

We've talked a lot about what emotion is, so I'm not going to go through all of it. But there's also the insular cortex, the fornix, the septum, the olfactory bulb, the mammary body, and of course the amygdala. So if you Google limbic system, you're going to see this long list of midbrain structures. They will throw in a few cortical things. Sometimes you see the cingulate cortex, sometimes you see the frontal cortex. But generally we're talking about midbrain nuclei that just respond to emotional stimuli. I'll give you a good example of this. The hypothalamus, which we've talked about before, is an example of part of the limbic system

because it controls the pituitary gland. It has control of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Therefore, it makes your heartbeat faster, makes your heart slow down. It makes your breathing pick up, it makes your breathing slow down. It plays a role in temperature regulation, fluid balance, eating control, sleep and wake regulation, sexual responses. So the hypothalamus is one of these things that controls a lot of the physical responses to an emotional stimulus. Like I said, I don't want to die a ton into the emotion because we did it at depth. I really want to focus on what is the role of emotion and decision making.

And it's pretty straightforward. It comes back to our concept of value. Now, I've used this example in the past. In fact, I used it in a recent TED Talk. The ultimatum game. You know, this is a game that was invented by economists to prove a point in my mind. But it's kind of a, you know, it's a good use case for this idea of emotion and decision making. So the ultimatum game is fairly straightforward. There's two players. One player is given an amount of money and their job is to essentially offer some of that money or all of that money to another player. So let's say they're given $100. Their job is to make an offer to the other player.

Make an offer to split it, say 50-50. They could make an altruistic offer and give away 80% of the money and keep 20%. They could be greedy and keep 90% and give away 10. That's their job. Make the offer. The other player has to say yes or no. That's their job. If they say yes, the share occurs. So if I offer you $80 and I say I'll keep 20 and I say, yes, I get $80, you keep your 20 and we're done. If I offer you $10 and say I'll keep 90, I say yes, I get the money. I say no, no one gets any money.

Now, there's a couple keys to understand the ultimate game. And a lot of people, if you don't understand the rules, the game doesn't make sense. Well, number one, the offer, the decision on the offer is final, the offer is final. So if I say yes, the share occurs, if I'm the person being offered the money, if I say no, no one gets any money. Rule number one. Rule number two, you only play one time. Now, rule number two is the most important rule, because if you played more than once, then logically, because I want to keep this analytical at first, you could argue that saying no to an offer makes sense because you're sending a message. You're basically saying if you don't treat me fairly, I'm going to reject offers until you treat me fairly. That's actually a logical or analytical system 2 strategy. However, if you only play one time, you should accept any offer. And the reasoning is simple. If you are completely doing this from an analytical perspective, any money is better than no money. So you should accept any offer. Now, you do this in humans. You find some interesting things. First of all, you find no one's altruistic.

I hate to disappoint you, but everyone's greedy. No one ever says, well, you could have $80, I'll keep $20. People, you know, the best they do is $50, $50, and then they get greedy. Now, what you find with humans is people say no to unfair offers sometimes. So if I say, I'll keep $90, you have $10. A fair number of people reject that offer. Now, the question is why. The analytical brain is being overridden,

analytically you should take the $10. It's the best offer. Why do you say no? Well, your emotional system. Your emotional system flares up and says, this is nonsense. I'm not doing this. All right, reject the offer. Now, from a decision-making perspective being mechanical about this, what's actually happening? Well, there's a value for accepting the offer and there is a value for rejecting the offer. And if you were just going to go in terms of, of money, the value for rejecting the offer is zero and the value for accepting the offer is 10 and the probability would be 100 on either case. So those are your expected values. It's an easy choice. But what is the emotional system actually doing? In a sense, it's artificially

inflating values. It's going to increase the value of saying no or rejecting the unfair offer. and it's going to increase it to a point that that choice has more perceived value than accepting the money. So you're still working with your simple decision-making model. It's just the emotional system is biasing values. And that's what it does. You know, I'd like to think of an example. You know, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this on the podcast, but before I went back to school, I was a high school gym teacher for a while.

and you know when you watch kids pick teams it's almost hilarious because you make two captains and you start picking kids from the class to be on your team and you can see this dilemma you can literally see on a kid's face going well I should pick Johnny because he's the big strong athlete and he'll help my team win but Mike's my best friend and so from an analytical perspective you take Johnny but emotion overrides this and you end up picking your best friend because it's your best friend. It's your emotional system overriding values. This was me last night. I'm trying to lose a bit of weight, you know, be healthy, all that stuff. And I had a choice between a piece of fruit and a chocolate chip cookie. Given my view of the world, the priests of fruit

had higher value. Yet my emotional system overrode that value and gave a higher value to the chocolate chip cookie, so I ended up getting the chocolate chip cookie. And it was fantastic. So that's the role of the emotional system in decision-making. It basically biases values. And in terms of a practical real-world tip, and we'll come back to this in the future episode, but here's one right now. The emotional system, we've talked about this a lot over the years. Remember, it responds quickly and it fades quickly.

It's like the anger thing. It flares up and then it flares down. So if you're about to make a decision and you think the emotional system might be bias and your values, just count the 30. Go for a walk. Just take yourself away for a short period of time and you might find that your values are different. Okay, there it is, emotional decision making. We've actually talked about it before. This is sort of the new version and a bit of a recap to fit into this season's run on decision making. Don't forget the website, that neuroscience guy.com links to Etsy and Patreon. Etsy,

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