The value function curve.
I was blobbed out on the couch watching the end of L.A. Story when the narrator’s phrase struck: ‘Why do we never know when we’ve found love, but we always know when we’ve lost it?’ I was struck, because I knew the answer. And it’s to do with the way Emotion rules our world.
In How the Brain Thinks) I write: ‘We float through life on a sea of uncertainty where emotion rules the waves; fear and anxiety are rife, and happiness is elusive and ephemeral. The God of Small Things constantly gives and constantly takes away. Just like Time, the fine mist of emotion swirls around us, blanketing us and suffusing through us, changing our lives. Its constant prescience ebbs and flows with the changing contexts of the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years, influencing how we think’.
Emotion in neuroscience is simply our fast, initial response to an event, object or piece of information. It is binary, like computer code, simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and is largely mediated through the amygdala in the lower temporal lobe of the brain. Emotion exists unseen, is simply ‘like’ or ‘dislike’, like so much in our current vitriolic echo-chamber driven world.
Feelings, though, are like attention — showcased and able to be discussed and modified. Our feelings develop after the rapid initial emotional response. This is called the affective response, and is what most of us mean when we talk about ’emotions’. Developing feelings takes time, and comes as the hypothalamus and the autonomic systems kick in, producing those gut feelings that we all know about and have to live with, as well as the myriad of other responses like anger or guilt or shame. These words have become synonymous with emotion, but they are really feelings.
The rapid initial instinctive emotional response also includes an estimation of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ the emotion is. It becomes ‘tagged’ with a number, a valence and this number increases with loss and is relatively neutral for gain.
Loss hurts. The power of love and romance may be related to
our fear of losing it. News sells because news is mainly about
loss and negative experience. Our memories of negative experiences
weigh heavily on our minds, whereas memories from our
positive experiences float gently along, carrying little emotional
weight. In psychological terms, the perceived negative value of
every unit of loss is much more than the perceived value of an
equivalent gain.
This was first described in 1984, in a seminal paper on loss and gain, by Kahneman and Tversky , and reproduced in Choices Values and Frames.
To demonstrate this, we can plot the numbers of gains on the
positive portion of the X-axis, and the numbers of losses on the
negative portion. By plotting the perceived value of those losses
or gains on the Y-axis, a value function curve is obtained. The
curve is described as being concave for gains and convex for
losses and the slope of the curve is much steeper for losses than
it is for gains.
This has led to the concept of ‘loss aversion’, where ‘a loss of $X
is more aversive than a gain of $X’. It also explains the reason
that people are reluctant to bet on a fair coin for equal stakes,
as the attractiveness of the gain cannot make up for the feeling
of aversion we get when we lose the same amount. Most
undergraduates in a particular sample ‘refused to stake $10 on
the toss of a coin if they stood to win less than $30’
There have been many criticisms and modifications of the original research, such as that by Eldad Yechiam. but there are neuroscience studies that back up the original research. In EEG studies of the electrical activity of the brain in 2002, Gehring and Willoughby had twelve participants make choices in a two-choice ‘monetary gambling
task’. The subjects were then told whether they had lost or
gained, and what the outcome of the other choice was. EEG
recordings were used to measure where the spikes of electrical
activity were produced when they were given the results.
A negative ‘event-related potential’ (ERP) was ‘probably generated
by a medial-frontal region in or near the anterior cingulate
cortex (ACC)’. This occurred ‘within 265 milliseconds after’ participants
were presented with the results. The medial frontal
cortex is close to the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex,
forming part of the system involved with the assessment of
reward and loss.
The size of the spike ‘was greater when a participant’s choice
between two alternatives resulted in a loss than when it
resulted in a gain’. Gains did not produce ‘the medial-frontal
activity, even when the alternative choice would have yielded
a greater gain, and losses elicited the activity even when the
alternative choice would have yielded a greater loss’. Paradoxically,
‘choices made after losses were riskier and were associated with greater loss-related activity than choices made after
gains’
In the current Covid-times, we hear, rightly, about the large numbers of infections and this continues to spur us to read the news. But the numbers of deaths from road accidents and influenza, for example, that were prevented in lockdown by Coronovirus hardly gets a mention.
Good news never sells, right? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Take care out there
