Embodied Feeling and Reason in Decision-Making: Assessing the Somatic-Marker Hypothesis0

Introduction

Philosophers and social theorists have long debated how feelings, emotions and related affective phenomena interact with rationality, reason and cognition. Only within the last few decades have scientists begun to investigate this seemingly intractable problem. Never a purely cognitive process, reasoning typically occurs within the context of social relationships, which can be competitive, self-interested, and market-oriented, or collegial, cooperative, and egalitarian. These social relationships and the emotions they engender can surely diminish rationality, by predisposing one to misattribute causes, distort beliefs, lose cognitive focus, or become either overly risk-averse or risk-oriented (Slovic, 2000; Pham, 2007). On the other hand, under most circumstances (where lack of information and lack of time render logical-analytic reasoning impossible), the quality of decision-making will be enhanced by feelings and signals from the body and emotions from the brain (TenHouten, 2013b). Because emotionshave the capacity to impair cognition, under certain circumstances the brain sometimes needs to, and does, set emotions aside. Longe, Senior and Rippon (2009), as one example, conducted an fMRI study of 10 healthy subjects who had been highly motivated for successful task performance (i) where there are potentially significant financial payoffs, and (ii) heavy demands are placed on short-term memory. Under these circumstances, subjects' lateral frontal cortex -- which performs hard, high-reason tasks that place heavy demands on short-term memory -- inhibits and suppresses activity in the medial prefrontal cortical areas, and thereby reduces distracting emotion-laden messages. In this experiment, the dorsolateral frontal cortex (DLPFC) communicated or interfaced with the ventral frontal cortex (VMPFC, the portion of the frontal lobes located above the eye sockets), but not with the medial frontal cortex. These two areas of the frontal lobes -- the DLPFC and VMPFC -- are strongly connected. The VMPFC is linked to reward sensitivity and is involved in conation (motivation). This and other fMRI studies (e.g., Pochon et al, 2002) of humans found that, if reward levels and cognitive demands are set at high levels, activation of the lateral frontal areas (DLPFC) and of the lateral frontopolar regions ensues. At the same time, there is decreased activation in the frontal lobes' medial regions. These and other experimental results suggest an inhibitory relationship between the lateral and the medial portions of the frontal lobes of the human brain, with the lateral areas inhibiting the medial areas.Under certain circumstances, therefore, where substantial rewardsfor cognitive performance are anticipated, performance is optimized if cognition can operate freely of feelings and emotions. In the everyday world, in contrast, beyond such unusual or contrived situations-- where mental life seeks not optimizing but satisficing decisionmaking --this is not typically the case. Indeed, problem-solving and decision-making typically rely on feelings, emotions and simple heuristics (Gigerenzer et al, 1999; Berthoz, 2006; Ohira, 2010). Evans (1989, 1998), Damasio (1994, 1999), and Anderson, Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Damasio (1999) have persuasively championed the view that good use of reason depends on emotions and feelings, while Pott (1992) even sees emotions as specific forms of rationality. These and many other scholars have adduced impressive evidence showing that,under ordinary circumstances,both feelings and emotions assist reasoning, particularly in personal and social matters involving conflict and risk, and especially where information is lacking and indepth cognitive analysis would be time-consuming and arduous. Our focus here, however, is on the role of feelings, rather than emotions, as thesefeelings are involved in decision-making. The word feeling refers to the physical sensation of touch, but also connotes all conscious experiences of inner bodily states, including the experience of physical drive states, such as hunger, pain, and fatigue, sentiments, and desires. Thus, a person might have a warm feeling toward another, a feeling of unease in a social situation, a feeling that one might be falling in love, or that one's presence at a social event is unwelcome. Feelings and emotions are often conflated in everyday discourse (Arieti, 1970). Feelings are often described as emotions, as in saying, "I feel angry/jealous/happy", while emotions, in turn, are often defined in terms of feelings. In psychology, feelings refer to a person's conscious state of mind, including their evaluation of what is agreeable and disagreeable, or pleasant or painful, as experienced by the body. Feelings reflect emotions and their perturbing effects on the body, but they are also influenced by the brain's mappings of the state of the muscles, the posture and orientation of the body, and the states of the circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and nervous systems. All of these are mapped in the body-sensing region of the brain. A feeling, in its essence, then, is a mind-state expressing an idea of the body. Thus, while the object of an emotion is apt to be external --typically involving other persons with whom one is socially engaged-- the object of a feeling is internal, for it is of the body (Damasio, 2003). Bodily feeling-states, which Damasio (1994) calls somatic markers, can contribute to rapid and effective decision-making, especially in risky and uncertain conditions in which a cognitive analysis would require a great deal of time and energy to carry out. A fully rational decision-making process requires formulating behavioral options,performing a cost-benefit analysis, then choosing a promising option. If a decision must be made quickly, and without much information, reactions of the body can provide important signals that assist decisionmaking.

These bodilysignals, or somatic markers, encompass affective events spanning excitement or depression, visceral activity (gut feelings), feelings of arousal, muscular tension, pulse-rate change, sudden sweating, a queasy feeling, a tingling sense of possible danger, a gnawing suspicion, a feelingof being refreshed, a sense of foreboding, or a feeling of anticipatory excitement. These bodily signals are somatic markers. The concept of somatic markers is this article's main topic, but we first further distinguish reason and affect by considering dual-process models.

Economic Behavior and Dual-Process Models

In psychology, dual process models explain how mental phenomena result from two qualitatively different processes; one is fast, automatic, and affect-laden, the other is slow, deliberate, and largely cognitive. Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and Kahneman (2011; see also Epstein, 1994; Sun, 2002; and Paivio, 2007) recognize two such styles of mental processing. System 1 is a largely intuitive, associative, fast, and automatic, affect-laden process that favors immediate rewards, and is equipped with a nuanced picture of the world. It is based on retained memory, learned patterns of association, and works with the information it presently possesses, which enables it to generate reactions, opinions, and snap judgments, often based on mere association and narrative coherence. System 2 is the conscious, thinking, mind which we think of as the decider, and reasoner. This is a slower and more deliberate logic-based process,subject to conscious judgment and control. Itis typically utilized to choose longer-term options, andinvolves great mental effort and will-power in the pursuit of problem-solving and goal-attainment. This kind of reasoning requires an ability to defer gratification during goal-attainment processes, an abilitythat can be compromised when passions and cognized interestsconflict. It is when there is an inner tension between desires and goals that Systems 1 and 2 are most apt to come into conflict. An active mind, Kahneman (2011) maintains, must be able to make use of System 2, which predicts success in decisionmaking and goal-attainment. The existence of these two mental systems, the feeling-passion- and emotion-based system (System 1), and the cognitively-based system (System 2), has been at least partially criterion validated by McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein and Cohen (2004), in an fMRI study of 14 subjects. The study hypothesized that the System 1's brain infrastructure consists of limbic structures, which respond emotionally to immediate rewards but are relatively insensitive to future rewards. In contrast, long-run patience, a capability of System 2, was hypothesized to be mediated by the future-oriented lateral prefrontal cortex and related structures; these can evaluate the utilities of possible distant-future rewards. McClure and colleagues found that, for choices in which money was immediately available (as opposed to being available after a two-week or one-month delay), System 1 areas were significantly activated, specifically the ventral striatum, the medial orbitofrontal cortex (which processes emotion), the posterior cingulate cortex, and the left posterior hippocampus. These areas are limbic structures or closely associated paralimbic cortical projections; these are heavily innervated by midbrain dopamine sources, and are consequently responsive to reward expectations (Knutson, Fong, Adams, Varner and Hommer, 2001; McClure et al, 2004). The contrasting System 2 areas, activated uniformly during all decisión epochs, were associated with lateral prefrontal areas. These are usually implicated in higher-level cognitive deliberations, cognitive control, numerical cognition, and value assessment. In this experiment, they were activated by quantitative analysis of economic options and valuation of future opportunities for reward (see also Miller and Cohen, 2001). The lateral prefrontal cortex, which assesses reward values, irrespective of their delay, was similarly activated during all choice conditions. This and related studies (e.g., McCoy and Platt, 2005) provide neuroscientific evidence for this proposed duality of cortical processing. Under certain conditions, this processing involves a negotiation between areas of the brain that generate emotions and areas that generate the higher cognitive functions necessary for instrumental, future-oriented planning for goal-attainment. Other studies show interactions between prefrontal and limbic mechanisms in various behavioral contexts, ranging from economic and moral decision-making, to visceral responses, to pain and disgust (Ochsner, Bunge, Gross and Gabrieli, 2002; Sanfey et al, 2003; Wager et al, 2004). There apparently occurs a negotiation between lowerlevel autonomic processes and the uniquely human capacity for abstract reasoning. If the lower-level passions do not interfere with future planning, then instrumental rationality becomes possible. Aristotle was thus correct when he proposed that it is the power of reason which sets humanity apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. While mammals in general possess a limbic system (MacLean's 1990 mammalian brain), only humans have developed a large and highly differentiated neocortex that enables, but hardly guarantees, the attainment of rationality.

Somatic States and Decision-Making: The Somatic-Marker Hypothesis

Kahneman (2011) provides compelling arguments that people exaggerate the extent to which their decisions and judgments are based on rational cognition. Individuals are rather predisposed to a non-analytic, non-logical reliance on heuristics, cues, and simple associations between concepts. This is especially so for decision-making in risky circumstances, wherein complex, conflicting choices and a sense of urgency can make it infeasible to rely solely on cognition. This is because computational obstacles related to the number and complexity of possible courses of action, combined with the difficulty of evaluating these options' posible long-term consequences, render decision-making excessively time-consuming and arduous. Under such constraints, affect-laden bodily responses -- somatic markers, can both bias and hasten decision making (Panksepp, 1998). This System 1 -baseddecisionmaking strategy - (i) focuses upon immediatelyavailable relevant information and beliefs, (ii) uses bounded rationality to evaluate options as simply satisfactory or not satisfactory (Simon, 1982), and (iii) rapidly excludes bad choices from the set of posible behavioral decisions. Damasio, Tranel and Damasio (1991; see also Bechara and Damasio, 2005) propose that hunches, intuitions, and bodily signals mediated by both the peripheral and central nervous systemscan also enhance goal-directed cognition. Damasio, Tranel and Damasio (1991) define asomatic marker as an automatic, bodily signal which influences neocortical processes that enable an individual to parse between behavioral alternatives before these are subjected to rational analysis and executive decision making. Somatic and visceral states, when mapped into body-representing structures of the brain, enable rapidelimination of negative behavioral alternatives which are as potentially harmful or painful. Damasio et al. (1991) hypothesize that an overall somatic feelingstate will bias cognitive assessment of present decisión alternatives and, more generally, regulate decisionmaking. But where in the brain is the overall state of the body represented? Craig (2009) has recently shown that the anterior insula, particularly on the right side of the brain, integrates bodily physiological states and then conveys information about these states to the prefrontal cortex via the von Economo neurons, which possess large spindle-shaped soma and long, single, one-directional, apical axons. Allman, Watson, Tetreault and Hakeem (2005) suggest that these neurons, which connect the insula and the frontal cortex, contribute to decision-making insofar as this is aided by bodily states. In Damasio's model, signals of bodily responses represented in the brain remain largely out of conscious awareness, but be consciously monitored and experienced as feelings.Thus, somatic markers send information to the somatosensory cortices (via brainstem nuclei), especially the right insula, that map the body. Rational cognitive processing is apt to be accentuated during states of rest when such markers are inactive and peripheral feedback in sensory and motor functions is not required (Marr, 2006; Teuber, 1972). Consider as an example muscular tension, directed by nonconscious information, which can bias a choice between rational alternatives. Some initial support for the SMH came from an Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Damasio (1997) presented four decks of cards to 10 normal subjects and 6 subjects with bilateral ventromedial prefrontal brain (VMPFC) damage. After turning over a card, subjects either win or lose varying amounts of play money. Unbeknownst to the subjects, there are two bad decks and two good decks. The game ends after the 100th card is played, or the player's money is exhausted. Skinconductance responses (SCRs) were chosen as an indicator of body state. It was found that,after several rounds of card-picking, normal subjects learned to decide advantageously; they picked a majority of their cards from the good decks. After several picks, it was found that anticipatory SCRs, several seconds before each card selection, were significantly higher preceding bad-deck selection. According to Bechara et al. (1997), somatic markers (indicated by SCRs) had enabled subjects to make advantageous selections even before conscious knowledge was available. VMPFC damaged patients performed poorly on the IGT (Bechara et al, 1994, 1997), and continued to select from the bad decks throughout the experiment, even though some of them correctly identified good and bad decks. Unlike normal controls, they failed to develop higher anticipatory SCRs for the bad decks. Bechara, Damasio and colleagues have inferred from these results that VMPFC damage impairs the processing of somatic markers, such that these patients' cognitive impulsiveness rendered them largely oblivious to future losses. However, there is another possible explanation for these patients' poor performance on the IGT. In this experiment, the $100-reward bad decks (compared to $50-reward good decks) initially appear very good. In one of these decks, the first nine outcomes are $100 wins, followed by a $1,250 loss. Confronted with such an improbable winning streak (p = 1/28 = 0.003), a rational subject might well conclude that the decks had not been shuffled into randomness but were purposefully arranged, so that a deck containing one such improbable streak might well have been intentionally designed to contain other such streaks. Even without this inference, these patients would likely have experienced difficulty in overcoming a response tendency induced by their initial positive experiences (Maia and McClelland, 2004). Rolls et al. (1994) has shown that VMPFC-damage patients have difficulty in simple reversal tasks (e.g., first gaining a point for touches of a screen; later losing a point for each screen touch). Bechara, Tranel and H. Damasio (2000) objected to this alternative explanation of patients' behavior, pointing out that some of the Rolls et al. patients had damage that extended from the VMPFC laterally into the orbitofrontal cortex. But Fellows and Farah (2003), in response, demonstrated that their subset of patients with lesions confined to VMPFC also showed impaired reversal in simple reversal learning. Moreover, Fellows and Farah shuffled the same cards used in the initial IGT, after which performance of the VMPFC patients became indistinguishable from normal controls. Both Rolls et al. (1994) and Fellows and Farah (2005) have shown that VMPFC patients' deficit in adapting to reversal in contingencies extends beyond the laboratory to everyday life situations (e.g., when to make a followup doctor's appointment). Maia and McClelland (2004), in their review of this evidence, further observe that patients with only dorsolateral PFC damage also perform poorly in the IGT (Fellows and Farah, 2005),which suggests the possible involvement of working memory in the IGT, which would be inconsistent with the Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Anderson (1998) claim that somatic markers play an unconscious role in decision making. Maia and McClelland (2004) attempted to replicate the Bechara et al. (1998) study twice, each time with 20 undergraduate subjects. The first experiment fully replicated the Bechara et al. results. In their second replication, they used a more sensitive and detailed questionnaire, and found that players had extensive conscious knowledge about the game. Players' verbal reports indicated that they possessed even more knowledge of the advantageous strategy than their actual behavior would indicate; moreover, when they behaved advantageously, they nearly always reported knowledge about the goodness of the decks, which was sufficient to guide their advantageous behavior. Contrary to the conclusion of Bechara et al. (1998) the Maia-McClelland results provided no justification for the claim that non-conscious biases guide advantageous behavior; they suggest further that Bechara et al. had relied on methods insufficient to assess subjects' conscious knowledge about the game. Maia and McClelland instead found that, when subjects behaved advantageously in the IGT, (i) it was because they had conscious awareness of the relative goodness and badness of the decks, and (ii) their possession of this explicit, reported knowledge could have provided the basis for their judgments and behavioral choices. Ian Tomb et al. (2002) also question the Bechara et al. (1997) explanation of why SCRs have been found to be higher for the bad decks than for the good decks in the IGT. Two possible explanations were compared: (i) As claimed by Bechara et al., anticipatory SCRs might be correlates of correct versus incorrect decision making; that is, larger anticipatory SCR magnitude for bad decks represented a net bodily state, or a crude bodily signal, that gradually biased subjects against the bad decks; (ii) The alternative explanation was that, because both the rewards and punishments were much greater for the bad decks than for the good decks, anticipatory SCRs might have been higher for bad decks because the subjects were expecting higher-magnitude gains or losses from the bad decks. To determine which explanation was likely correct, Tomb and colleagues conducted two experiments (each with 10 undergraduate subjects). In the first experiment, where the magnitudes of both rewards and punishments were higher for the bad decks than for the good decks, the SCRs were higher for the bad decks. But in a second experiment, the reward-magnitude bias was reversed; the decks were modified so that the good decks had both higher rewards and higher magnitudes of punishments. Following this experimental design change, the initial finding was reversed, supporting the second, alternative hypothesis: The anticipatory SCRs were now higher for the good decks than for the bad decks. This striking result further undermines the Bechara et al. claim. Across both experiments, deck-selection was driven by cognitions about long-term consequences, whereas anticipatory SCRs were apparently driven by the immediate acts to be performed, namely choosing the next card, independently of the positive or negative long-term impact on earnings. SCRs, it can be concluded, had not provided evidence for the presence of somatic markers in decision making.1 The choice of skin-conductance response (SCR) as a somatic marker might in itself be problematic. This is because SRC might not involve the periphery, but rather represent regulation by structures of the brain stem and hypothalamus. However, expanding the meaning of the somatic marker to include such neurological processes renders a putative somatic marker nearly equivalent to the concept of emotion. The best measure for sustained tonic levels of tension is arguably not the SCR, which measure transient responses, but skin-conductance level, which measures sweat gland activity in response to events. Tonic levels of muscular tension produced under continuous choice alternatives are generally known to modulate not effective choosing, but rather avoidance behaviors (Marr, 2011). Marr notes that Damasio has not provided a systematic explanation of autonomic arousal and its physiological and cognitive antecedents.SCR has, however, been found to be an effective predictor of rejecting unpleasant and psychologically distressing behavioral options (van 't Wout et al, 2006). While there have been numerous efforts to demonstrate the existence of a somatic-marker mechanism through IGT-based experimental research, this experimental paradigm has not been successful. As reviewed by Dunn, Dalgleish and Lawrence (2006), the psychophysiological data provide only ambiguous evidence, and causal evidence linking peripheral feedback to IGT performance has not been established. More recently, however, an entirelydifferent kind of evidence strongly suggests the existence of somatic markers. Osumi and Ohira (2010) conducted ultimatum-game studies, wherein two players -- proposer and responder -- split a sum of money provided by the experimenter. A fair offer by proposer to respondent is 50/50; if the proposer offers much less than a 50/50 split, the offer is apt to be regarded as selfish and unfair, and rejected on sociomoral grounds; in this case neither player receives a reward. If the responder is economically rational, he or she will accept any offer on the grounds that, fair or not, acquiring some money is better than no money. To reject an unfair offer is not instrumentally or economically rational, but is rather an emotional, and possibly substantively rational, decision (Weber, 1921; TenHouten, 2013a, 2013b). Osumi and Ohira found a cardiac orienting response (pulse-rate deceleration) approximately one second after an unfair offer, but only when the offer was then rejected; this typically happened after about five seconds, the time needed to resolve the conflicto between aneconomically-reasoned acceptance and an affect-laden, value-based rejection. This bodily response (governed by the vagus nerve system) preceded conscious decision making, suggesting the cardiac response was a somatic marker. To investigate the hypothesized role of the insula in this somatic precursor to offer rejection, Ohira and Osumi (2009) used fMRI to study posible involvement of the insula in emotional rejection. They contrasted brain activation during ultimátum game play with activation during the similar dictator game (where money was automatically split and the responder could not reject the offer). This comparison was intended to isolate brain activation reflecting pure decision-making processes, by subtracting other processes such as fairness evaluation. Activation of the right anterior insula robustly predicted the rejection rate of unfair offers, with the correlation between fMRI signal change and percent rejection rate r = 0.81 (p< 0.001), which suggested that the insula was indeed involved in decision making utilizing heart-rate deceleration as a somatic marker. Psychopaths are known to be affectively impaired in responses to aversive stimuli -- as they typically show less activation than normal controls in the affective neural circuitry (e.g., Benninger, Patrick and Iacono, 2005); they also tend not to learn from negative experiences (Hare, 2001). Osumi and Ohira (2010) hypothesized that psychopathic individuals, when compared to normal controls, would show less emotion (and changed somatic activity) and thus act economically rational in the ultimatum game, that is, would be predisposed to accept any offer on the ground that any reward is better than none. This outcome was obtained. In a study of 28 Japanese college students, 12 (5 female) were rated high on primary psychopathy and 16 (8 female) rated low. All played the role of responder in 30 one-shot ultimátum games. The offers followed presentation of photos of the putative proposers, but the experiments actually controlled the mix of fair (50/50) and unfair (< 50/50 offers), a process known to evoke emotional states. As hypothesized, subjects high on the psychopathy scale accepted significantly more unfair offers than did the low psychopathy subjects. Subjects with a low tendency toward psychopathy showed a greater SCR response to unfair vs. Fair offers. This lower SCR was associated with a higher acceptance rate, and supports a feeling basis for irrational rejection (van't Wout et al, 2006). The psychopathic subjects were less often willing to accept the costs of rejection of unfair offers, possibly indicating their tendency to focus on short term gains while ignoring long-term reciprocal strategies in their interpersonal interactions (Rilling et al, 2002). Thus, consistent with the SMH, emotions and bodily states are ordinarily activated in evaluating decision-making in situations of risk and uncertainty. Somatic markers can aid decision-making quality under such circumstances, yet their absence can lead to a kind of rationality that is narrowly instrumental while showing a pathological lack of substantive, value-based rationality.

Discussion

Somatic markers inform the brain structure that represents the state of the body, especially the right-hemisphere insula. This brain processing comprises the feeling that precedes, and informs, decision-making, which also involves frontal-lobe processing of cognitions and emotions (largely of limbic origin). If an individual playing the ultimátum game is presented an unfair offer, at least one somatic marker (heart-rate deceleration) is apt to rapidly inform the insular cortex, which will pass along that and other representations of bodily state. Clearly, the perception that one has been presented with an unfair offer triggers a number of bodily reactions, some of which occur quickly and can serve as somatic markers, and some of which develop too slowly to be somatic markers. The search for somatic markers involves identification of bodily responses that temporally precede cognitive representations of logicallyorganized ideas and of emotions. These somatic markers do not transmit it immediately to the frontal lobes, but rather are mapped, as part of a net somatic state, by the right insula. The somatic states that are mapped included hunger, thirst, sweat levels, muscular tension, and pulse rate changes. Bechara and colleagues have focused on skin-conductance responses, which they saw as enabling subjects in IGT experiments to make advantageous deck selections even before they consciously recognized which decks were good or bad. However, Maia and McClelland found that subjects had extensive knowledge about the game before making their selections, so that it cannot be inferred that non-conscious biases of somatic origin were guiding advantageous behavior. Other researchers (including Tomb et al, 2002) have observed differences in the bad and good decks, with both rewards and punishments higher for the bad decks. This creates a bias in decision making. When they removed this bias in a replication, the result claimed by Bechara concerning the SRC measures disappeared. Moreover, skin-response conductance is less appropriate as a measure of somatic activation than is skin-response level (indicating sweat-gland activity). Yet another deficiency has been detected in the studies of frontal-lobe-damaged patients, who were presented abad deck that began with eight wins in a row followed by a large loss. Such frontal damage, as is well known, creates a tendency to persist in established behavioral responses. This result was also virtually erased merely by shuffling the decks. Taken as a whole, it becomes difficult to avoid concluding that the IGTis an inadequate experimental paradigm for demonstrating the existence of somatic markers. Such a conclusion, of course, does not mean there is no such thing as a somatic marker. In fact, Osumi and Ohira (2010), using a different experimental paradigm,theultimatum game,have clearly shown the existence of a somatic marker, pulse-rate deceleration (PRD). During the brief period between being made an offer and deciding whether or not to accept or reject it, there was PRD, a cardiac activity response. Using fMRI, they found that PRD was correlated with right insular activation. By contrasting ultimátum game measures with dictator game measures -- where offers were automatically set and could not be rejected -- the brain-activation differences were attributable to pure decision-making. They found that offer rejection was robustly correlated with right insular activation (r = 0.80). These results strongly suggest that PRD stimulated right insular activation, and that insular evaluation of bodily state was then communicated to the frontal lobes, where cognitive and emotional processes became involved prior to decision-making. Clearly, the SMH deserves further investigation. Further research might well determine that some somatic states which develop rapidly following perception serve as somatic markers, and other bodily reactions, especially those that are visceral and slower, do not. It is also likely that, while the right insula is a major pathway from somatic markers to the frontal lobes (and the amygdala is undoubtedly also involved), and informs both cognition and emotion. There surely are other channels as well. The search for somatic markers is important not only for neuroeconomics, but for the social sciences as well. Various somatic theories of human social behavior have emerged, which are based loosely, and largely uncritically, on a synthesis of (i) the SMH, (ii) Bowlby's (1988) attachment theory, and (iii) the self-psychology first articulated by Kohut (1977) and elaborated by Schore (2003). This theorizing has spawned, or developed together with, applications in embodied mind theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999), the evolution of human morality (Narvaez, 2014), performative linguistics (Robinson, 2008), speech act theory (Felman, 2003), actor training development (Sellers-Young,1998), and notions of bodilykinesthetic intelligence (Gardner, 1983). There is a certain wildness to such theorizing, much of which is based on shaky neuroscientific grounds, but such forays into "the wild blue yonder" (TenHouten, 1992) haveendeavored to explore the interface between body, brain, mind, and society. We can only hope that clarification of the SMH will better ground such extrapolation of the SMH to the social world.

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