When We’re Unsure How to Respond, How Does Our Brain Decide Whether a Situation is Pleasant or Not?

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Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the University of Haifa, Israel, have identified neural mechanisms that help us understand whether a difficult and complex social situation is emotionally positive or negative. “When someone offends you while smiling, should your brain interpret it as a smile or an offense? The mechanism we found includes two areas in the brain that act almost as ‘remote controls’ that together determine what value to attribute to a situation, and accordingly which other brain areas should be on and which should be off,” explains Dr. Hadas Okon-Singer of the University of Haifa, one of the leaders of the study.

We are all familiar with the expression “we don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” referring to a situation that includes both positive and negative elements. But how does the brain actually desire “whether to laugh or cry”? Dr. Okon-Singer explains that previous studies have identified the mechanisms by which the brain determines whether something is positive or negative. However, most of these studies focused on dichotomous situations – the participants were submitted either to a completely positive stimulus (a smiling baby or a pair of lovers) or a completely negative one (a dead body). The present study sought to examine complex cases involving both positive and negative stimuli.

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