CoursesCourse 12
Emotion and decision-making
Feelings are not noise in an otherwise rational mind. This course follows the science of emotion from the brain's alarm system to the body's part in a mood, and from the old advice to "control your emotions" to a better question: what does a feeling tell you, and what should you do with it? Along the way it says plainly which famous findings have held up and which have not.
Start lesson 1Lessons
- 1 The alarm that fires firstA woman with no fear walked up to snakes and into a haunted house. What her brain, and a rat's, show about a fast alarm and a slow check, and how smell, stress, and early care shape the system.
- 2 Managing a feelingThe same pounding heart can be fear or excitement. How the mind labels a feeling, why naming and reframing work better than hiding, and what to do when a low mood loops.
- 3 The body's partA pencil between the teeth, a punching bag, a hungry judge, a cup of hot coffee: which claims about the body and the mood survived a second look, and which did not.
- 4 Deciding with feelingThe brain tells stories about our feelings and choices. What emotion adds to a decision, what it costs, and why accepting a feeling works better than fighting it.
You’ll be able to
- Describe how the brain produces a fast emotional reaction and a slower, checked one, and say why the "fear center" label is too simple.
- Explain how a mind labels, reinterprets, or suppresses a feeling, and what the research says about the costs and limits of each way of managing it.
- Tell which claims about the body's part in emotion (facial expression, venting, breathing, sleep, hunger, warmth, the gut) have held up and which failed when other laboratories repeated them.
- Explain why people without emotional signals decide badly, why a feeling is evidence and not a verdict, and what accepting a feeling means in practice.
About this course
This course covers 情绪与决策 (Emotion and Decision-Making), the psychology and neuroscience of how feelings arise, how they are managed, and how they enter our choices. It continues from Course 10, Thinking, fast and slow, which showed that people do not choose like calculators and told the case of Damasio's patient Elliot. Here we ask the question that case leaves open: what is a feeling, and what is it doing in a decision?
The argument and the examples lead. Around them we add the primary research behind each claim (the clinical cases, the experiments, and the critiques), background for readers outside China, and hands-on activities. Emotion science is a field with live disputes and a replication crisis, so each lesson says which findings are solid, which have shrunk, and which failed when other laboratories tried again. Where a popular retelling differs from the published study, we use the published study.