Is Stress a mere matter of choice?

Muscular Tension: An Explanation from a Methodological Behaviorism

Abstract

A truism in psychology is that the activity of the striated musculature is maintained or reinforced by its consequences, and represents operant behavior. Yet, the striated musculature is divided into two main types that are different physiologically and are activated separately and not necessarily simultaneously. The question is whether they are different psychologically. That is, are different types of the striated musculature activated by different motivational principles? It is argued that separate motivational principles are imputed for different muscular types because of the private nature of muscular activity that is resistant to precise observation, but disappear with the application of experimental instrumentalities that can render these private events and their governing contingencies universally accessible or ‘public’. It is concluded that striated muscular activity is uniformly and consistently operant in nature, and can be functionally analyzed through a methodological behaviorism.



Operant conditioning is based on the cumulative record of consistent correlations between the universally observed or ‘public’ form or topography of behavior and its consequences. Operant conditioning embodies methodological principles, wherein the lawfulness of behavior is derived from a data language that precisely maps to the universally agreed upon facts of behavior. As a form of methodological behaviorism, operant conditioning principles directly consider only publicly observable behavior. Grasping, walking, talking, etc. are operant behaviors because they are modulated or ‘reinforced’ by their outcomes. Because these behaviors uniformly engage a specific organelle of the body, namely the striated musculature, a common presumption is that operant conditioning primarily reflects the conditioning of these muscles. Of course, convulsions, startle reactions, etc. do involve the striated musculature and can be mediated by neurological rather than purely cognitive causes, but in general muscular activity is guided by its functionality as consciously perceived.

It is commonly assumed that if striated muscles are activated, they are publically observed, and hence may be subsumed entire under an operant analysis. Yet only a fraction of striated muscular activity is observable publicly or privately. That is, the musculature may be activated yet not result in publicly observable responses, and neither may it be consciously or privately perceived by the individual. Ironically, the private activity of the musculature has long been made public through resolving instrumentalities (e.g., SCR, EMG) but rarely if ever has an operant analysis been employed to explain this behavior. Rather, tension has generally been construed to be an artifact of autonomic arousal that is elicited due to psycho-social ‘demand’. This interpretation regards muscular tension as subsumed under different motivational principles that do not incorporate contingency, such as the reflexive or S-R responses entailed by a fight or flight response, stress reaction, etc. (Marmot & Wilkinson, 2006). In this case, inferred mediating processes take the place of observed correlations between behavior and environmental events.

However, this conclusion may remain uncontested not because the relationship between tension and its governing contingencies is disproven, or because the relevant data are unobtainable, but because of a common misinterpretation of the semantics of ‘demand’. The purpose of this article is to argue that the same data and data language used to establish the concept that tension is reflexive or is a respondent can be reinterpreted to unequivocally demonstrate that muscular tension is an instrumental or operant behavior.


The Striated Musculature

Although the activity of the striated musculature comprises the majority of behavior as we understand it, its psychophysiology is not widely known. Muscle fibers are categorized into "slow-twitch fibers" and "fast-twitch fibers" (Squire et al. 2003). Slow-twitch fibers (also called "Type 1 muscle fibers") activate and deactivate slowly, but when activated they are also very slow to fatigue. Fast-twitch fibers activate and deactivate rapidly and come in two types: "Type 2A muscle fibers" which fatigue at an intermediate rate, and "Type 2B muscle fibers" which fatigue rapidly. These three muscle fiber types (Types 1, 2A, and 2B) are contained in all muscles in varying amounts. Muscles that need to be activated much of the time (like postural muscles) have a greater number of Type 1 (slow) fibers. When a muscle begins to contract, primarily Type 1 fibers are activated first, followed by Type 2A, then 2B. Type 1 fibers are often monotonically activated because of psychosocial ‘demand’ that in general does not engage fast twitch fibers. For an individual, this activation is only indirectly observed when these fibers subsequently fatigue, causing exhaustion and pain.

Muscular activation also causes systemic changes in the autonomic nervous system. Sympathetic autonomic arousal is elicited through the sustained contraction of high threshold motor units (Type 2) of the striated musculature, as occurs during running or weight training (Saito et al. 1986). But arousal may also be mediated by the sustained contraction of small low threshold motor (Type 1) units of the striated musculature (Mcguigan,1991), and can be measured directly through EMG (electromyogram) or through indirect measures of autonomic arousal (e.g., skin conductance response or SCR; galvanic skin response or GSR) elicited by tension induced arousal. Physiologically the neural pathways that detail how muscular tension instigates autonomic arousal (Gellhorn, 1967, 1972, Jacobson, 1970, Malmo, 1975) have been well established. Through a bi-directional connection between the reticular arousal system and muscle efferents, a dramatic decrease or increase in muscle activity throughout the body can respectively stimulate decreases or increases in sympathetic arousal. This striated muscle position hypothesis (McGuigan, 1993) holds that the critical controlling event for autonomic arousal is covert neuro-muscular activity, and that rapid striated muscular activity can “mediate and thereby control what has been called autonomic, cardiovascular, and electroencephalographic conditioning.” The question yet unanswered is how Type 1 fibers are conditioned.


Contingency and Demand

The contraction of Type 1 fibers occurs prior to and in tandem with type 2 muscular activation, and is essential to voluntary behavior. Type 1 activation also occurs to prime an individual for action and as such is also dependent upon the anticipated results of that activity. It thus follows that Type 1 fibres are commonly activated due to response contingencies. However, if type 1 muscular contraction occurs without the subsequent activation of type 2 musculature, then involuntary or reflexive mechanisms are generally imputed as represented by the ‘stimulus’ of demand. But does this concept of demand denote a true mechanism or is it merely a misrepresentation of the semantics or meaning of demand?

As popularly conceived, tension is a byproduct of reflexive processes (e.g. flight or fight) that are elicited by a requirement for performance represented by ‘threat’ or ‘demand’. But the requirement for performance entails a conscious or non-conscious appraisal of the consequences dependent upon performance or non-performance. These represent future contingent outcomes. Thus demand must implicate contingency. Hence demand cannot represent a stimulus event that elicits behavior, but rather denotes a response contingency that leads to the emission of behavior.

This is easily demonstrated through the facts of behavior. Specifically, sustained levels of muscular tension are commonly produced under continuous alternative contingencies or choices. For example, continuous decision making between alternative contingencies (e.g. doing housework or minding a child, working or surfing the internet, staying on a diet or eating ice cream, keeping a dental appointment or staying at home) is associated with sustained or tonic levels of tension that is painful. Surnamed the ‘Cinderella Effect’ from the fairy tale character who as a harried servant girl was first to wake and last to sleep (Wursted et al. 1991, 1996; Hagg, 1991; Lundberg, 1999), the continuous activation of type 1 motor units or muscles (also called Cinderella fibers) because of this psycho-social ‘demand’ causes them to eventually fail, and thus recruit other groups of muscles more peripheral to the original group, resulting in pain and exhaustion. In addition, as the name Cinderella suggests, these slow twitch fibers are slow to deactivate, and will continue activated even during subsequent intervals of rest (Lundberg et al, 2002). The aversive result of this long term activation conforms with McEwen’s model of ‘allostatic load’ (1998), which predicts that tension and arousal will be maladaptive when there is an imbalance between activation and rest/recovery. Specifically, continuous low level or ‘slight’ tension results in overexposure to stress hormones, high blood pressure, and resulting mental and physical exhaustion.

In these examples, the demand reflected by alternative or conflicting contingencies or ‘choices’ does not represent a discrete stimulus entity or entities that bypass cognition but rather comprises a cognitive event that denotes changing perceptual relationships between behavior and outcomes or a means-end contingency or ‘expectancy’. These alternative choices describe responses that lead to primary gains at the cost of moment to moment opportunity losses. Thus the primary gain of minding a child or accessing the internet comes at the moment to moment opportunity loss of performing household chores or office work. But what is the purpose of concurrent muscular activation? The sustained activation of type 1 fibers as elicited by the perception of alternative contingencies serves no direct functional purpose, but it may serve an indirect one. Sustained tension is painful, and as a rule pain imposes a new action priority to escape pain and to avoid future pain (Eccleston & Crombez, 1999). That is, pain serves to initiate avoidance behavior. Thus the pain of tension may serve to motivate an individual to escape from ‘no win’ situations wherein any choice entails loss. But if tension is due to information about the consequences of behavior, namely the avoidance of the painful entailments of tension, how can this be demonstrated?


Resting Protocols

The argument for the operant nature of type 1 muscular activity is that if tension only occurs when decisions result in moment to moment or imminent feasible or avoidable (i.e., opportunity) losses, then tension will not occur if there is no possibility of avoidance of future events, or no opportunity loss. That is, the loss remains, but the opportunity to avoid it does not. Thus, if tension occurs because it signals behavior that leads to the subsequent avoidance of the events that elicit tension, then it logically follows that tension is therefore ‘reinforced’ by prospective avoidance, and is an operant behavior.

A well known procedure used to eliminate the ability to avoid loss while responding under multiple alternative contingencies is called an exclusion time out (Zirpoli, 2005). Common in educational environments, an exclusion time out describes a period of time when an individual is restrained from performing all actions which are otherwise rewarding in order to extinguish targeted behavior (e.g. temper tantrums). Thus a child under time out must sit and not participate with classmates, engage in learning tasks, read a book, etc. Although the child incurs and is aware of loss, the difference is that this loss is unavoidable or non feasible. A time out is also the defining characteristic of resting. To rest is to take a time out from the choices or demands of a working day in order to achieve a state of relaxation. However, it does not implicate to what degree choices are reduced, mainly that they are. Thus, although resting may figuratively represent an exclusion time out, it does not literally match the definition. To do that requires a radical reduction of choices that entail imminent (i.e., moment to moment) feasible or opportunity loss, and this is implicitly or explicitly entailed in meditative procedures. The research consensus is that meditative procedures, including resting protocols that also eliminate or defer this mode of choice all correlate with an attendant state of relaxation (Holmes, 1984, 1988). For meditation and resting, an individual may be aware of choices and the opportunity loss incurred by not acting upon them, but also knows that avoidance of these losses is not possible. This demonstrates that tension is indeed highly correlated with the prospective avoidance of future events, and is an operant.

However, although the dependent measure of relaxation is shared by meditative and resting states, the independent measures for these have been expanded beyond the mere attenuation of choice. Thus for meditation, relaxation may not be primarily attributed to the reduction of choice, but to the manipulation of attention. This manipulation involves focusing attention on a stimulus event (concentrative meditation, Benson’s ‘relaxation response’). But as with the semantics of demand, the semantics of focused attention is also ill defined, and must also entail the restriction of choice. In effect, the focusing of attention restricts choice by avoiding environmental stimuli or the perception of the functional consequences of those stimuli, which conforms with the definition of mindfulness as choice-less awareness (Germer et al. 2005). Because meditation must entail moment to moment choice-less awareness or mindfulness, it may be inferred that the primary dependent measure of meditation, namely muscular relaxation, is also primarily due to the mindful or choice-less awareness implicit in meditation. (It must be stressed however that although mindfulness incorporates relaxation as one of its entailments, the modification of rumination that is integral to mindfulness influences other emotional responses that have no relationship to muscular activity, such as depression, regret, etc. In other words, mindfulness is not primarily a relaxation strategy, although it incorporates elements that induce relaxation.)

To reinterpret meditative and resting protocols as a ‘time out’ or ‘choice-less awareness’ makes the independent measures for relaxation equivalent. Thus meditation is rest because their respective dependent and independent measures are the same. Because type 1 musculature is easily activated and is slow to deactivate, nearly all choice that entails moment to moment imminent feasible loss (i.e., conflicting choices) must be eliminated or deferred for a continuous period of time for the musculature to totally relax, and this is what meditative and resting protocols implicitly do, and for mindfulness procedures, it is what they explicitly do. Yet because muscular activation is not painful or harmful in itself unless it is sustained, it is the persistence and not the degree of muscular activation that is deleterious. Thus the continuous options involved in a distraction filled environment that entails minor yet persistent gains/losses are far more painful and harmful than the short term and generally intermittent choices that populate our ruminations or worries. It follows that although ruminative behavior causes tension through the cognitive representation of incommensurate choices, it generally does not populate a working day, and if it occurs we often have time to recover from our intermittent worries. However, distractive environments are common, often continuous and inescapable, and result in the persistent activation of the musculature. Moreover, in this high tech world, we consciously populate our environment with continuous distractive choices from email to the web, but continue to misattribute the resulting tension to the content rather than context of our choices. That is, by emphasizing what choices we make rather than how our choices are related to each other, the origin of muscular tension derives from the wrong cause and engenders the wrong ‘cure’. Thus choice becomes incidental to tension as the latter is attributed to the level of activity rather than the choices engendered by that activity. The remedy for this error entails ultimately a redefinition of the very concept of stress itself.


The Semantics of Stress

“If you wish to converse with me, define your terms” (Voltaire).

In his class, the psychologist F. J. McGuigan (1993) would induce relaxation in his students through the technique of progressive relaxation. He would then drop a book to demonstrate how the startle reflex and related tension and associated arousal is inhibited or impossible without the presence of muscular tonus, a finding originally made by Sherrington (1909) and explained neurologically by Gellhorn (1967,1972). This underscored the physiological fact that tension is primarily not an artifact of arousal, but its cause. If the independent measure of contingency is added to the equation, the theoretical principle follows that tension is the body’s specific response to alternative response contingencies or choices. Because it indirectly controls and is controlled by the prospect of the occurrence or non occurrence of future events or reinforcers, tension is an operant. However, although tension and accompanying sympathetic arousal may be characterized as stress, it cannot be formally defined as stress. This is because the latter’s terms are not precisely defined.

An operant definition of tension differs from the classic definition of stress as “the body’s nonspecific response to a demand placed on it” (Selye, 1980). Yet these two principles are incommensurate not because of their predictions but because of their semantics. That is, Selye’s principle is not a scientific hypothesis because its terms are not clearly defined. The theoretical incoherence of the concept of stress explains why stress is resistant to a methodological behaviorism. It simply contains no terms that may be grounded on the publicly agreed facts of behavior. Nonetheless, a methodological behaviorism can increase our knowledge of the observable behavioral event, namely muscular tension and associated arousal, which in the popular lexicon at least is defined as stress.

Ultimately, tension is initiated by the perception of means end contingencies or expectancies. Tension is in turn instrumental in altering affect (i.e. it produces pain), which in turn intrinsically denotes the response contingencies (i.e. avoidance behaviors) that will remove the tension that causes it. This latter position conforms to the principle in cognitive neuroscience that affect is not prior to cognition nor is automatically elicited without cognition, but must be integrated with cognition (Storbeck & Clore, 2007). This is particularly important in the analysis of stress, since the common metaphorical representation of stress implies that stress is a ‘reaction’ to demand events that bypass appraisal or contingency. However, whether tension and arousal are stress or represent a kind of stress is immaterial to the pragmatic implications of an operant analysis of tension. Specifically, if the metaphor of ‘choice’ replaces the metaphor of ‘demand’ as the primary descriptor of the etiology of tension, then simple contingencies of reinforcement may provide a much more precise and uniform description of the operational measures that will permit us to predict and control the daily tensions that beset us. Nonetheless, this argument is won not by the parsimony and precision of a learning based explanation, but through the power of procedure to effect behavioral change. That of course is the mandate and justification of a true science of behavior.

References:

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Gellhorn, E. & Kiely, W. F. (1972) Mystical states of consciousness: Neurophysiological and clinical aspects. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 154, 399-405

Germer, C. K., Siegel, R. D., Fulton, P.R. (2005) Mindfulness and Psychotherapy. Guilford Press

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Holmes, D. S. (1988) The influence of meditation versus rest on physiological arousal: a second evaluation. In Michael A. West (Ed.) The Psychology of Meditation, Oxford: Clarendon Press

Jacobson, E. (1970) Modern treatment of tense patients. Springfield, Il: Charles C. Thomas.

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Saito, M., Mano, T., Abe, H., Iwase S. (1986) Responses in muscle sympathetic nerve activity to sustained hand-grips of different tensions in humans. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 55(5), 493-498

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Damasio's Error: A Bio-Behavioral Explanation of the Somatic Marker (2008)

The Somatic Marker: An explanation from a radical behaviorism



A. J. Marr


For much more on the theory of the somatic marker, see my new e-book on the psychology of the internet:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Internet

Abstract

The somatic marker hypothesis is one of the most influential explanations of how covert somatic responses guide decision making or choice. Although somatic markers are purported to derive from learning, the somatic marker has never been examined from the sole perspective of learning. It is the purpose of this article to deduce reliable correlations between the bio-behavioral antecedent and consequential events imputed by the primary exemplar of the somatic marker, namely muscular tension. The viability of the somatic marker of tension as a learned or conditioned response is examined, and correlations between tension and behavior can be used to derive testable hypotheses for behavioral control.

key words: Damasio, somatic marker, autonomic arousal, behavioral, mindfulness, tension, IGT


Introduction

The concept of the somatic marker is one of the most notable and controversial constructs that explain how somatic states enable and change thought, and in a broader sense, the etiology and function of emotion. Postulated by the neurologist Antonio Damasio (1995), the somatic marker hypothesis states that a state of arousal or a ‘gut feeling’ mediated by the peripheral and central nervous systems often precedes and influences decision making, and that arousal is in turn modulated or conditioned by unspecified learning principles. Inherent in the experience of arousal is that it acts as a conditioned or discriminative stimulus that non verbally connotes the overall goodness or badness of response options and assists reasoning by automatically parsing the response options that will be rationally considered that lead to a specific goal.

A distinct attribute of Damasio’s analysis is that the dependent and independent variables representative of the somatic marker are not behaviorally defined, thus rendering the somatic marker difficult to study as a product of learning. A behavioral event will be defined as a discrete and observable response that is directly initiated and modulated across trials by correlated changes in equally discrete and observable informative or discriminative events. These correlations and the predictions derived from them constitute the subject matter of a learning theory. This article will demonstrate that the somatic marker, although ostensibly controlled by learning, is incoherently defined as a learnable or behavioral event, and can only be systematically described from the perspective of learning theory if its dependent and independent measures are precisely defined. This analysis is informed by observable bio-behavioral processes, yet derives the somatic marker from an operational perspective. That is, although a learning perspective can explain covert somatic behavior as evidenced by the somatic marker through an integration of neurophysiological with behavioral events, it may also be used to derive a simple pragmatic model that isolates the personally accessible and manipulable events that permit covert behavior to be predicted and controlled. Conforming to the epistemological principles of a radical behaviorism, this perspective is informed by neuro-physiological processes, but is validated primarily by its predictive power. Another way of conceiving this is describing the somatic marker not from the vantage of its efficient causes as derived from complex neurophysiological processes, but in terms of teleological or final causes (Rachlin, 2007) that represent simple and discrete behavioral outcomes. In other words, a separate question yet to be answered is not how the somatic marker is instantiated through neuro-physiological processes, but what does the somatic marker in fact do. The virtue of this perspective is that it reduces the number of salient factors in its analysis, and produces easily testable predictions that are of major significance in the self control of emotional states.


The Somatic Marker

This somatic marker hypothesis finds primary support from a now classic experiment surnamed the Iowa Gambling Task, or IGT (Damasio,1995). As described by Tomb et al. (2002), “A subject was presented with four decks of cards. After turning over a card, participants either win or lose varying amounts of play money. Unknown to the participants, picking from two of the decks (‘good’ decks) will result in eventual gain, whereas picking from the other two decks (‘bad’ decks) will result in eventual loss. The task ends after the selection of the 100th card, when most normal individuals have picked more cards from the good than the bad decks. After several rounds of picking cards, it was found that ‘anticipatory ’autonomic arousal, as measured indirectly by the skin conductance response (SCR), was significantly higher for bad decks rather than good.” On the primary basis of this experiment, Damasio deduced that arousal acted to non-consciously alert the individual of the bad deck before its ‘badness’ could be rationally determined.

Arousal is the result of previous socialization or learning, and occurs prior to the conscious consideration of response options to alert one to or pre-determine the ‘goodness’ of a particular response set. In other words, autonomic arousal allows one to make a proper choice between response options prior to their rational consideration. The somatic marker (Damasio, 1995) “forces attention on the negative outcome to which a given action may lead, and functions as an automated alarm signal which says: Beware of danger ahead if you choose an option that leads to this outcome. The signal may lead you to reject, immediately, the negative course of action and thus make you chose among other alternatives. The automated signal protects you against future losses, without further ado, and then allows you to choose from among further alternatives. There is still room for using a cost/benefit analysis and proper deductive competence, but only after the automated step drastically reduces the number of options.”

It must be noted that although primarily justified through the peripheral measures of the
skin conductance response (SCR), somatic markers may not involve the periphery at all, but represent “states of bio-biochemical regulation in structures of the brain stem and hypothalamus” (Damasio, 1995). For example, ‘feelings’ of elation, depression, regret etc. certainly ‘mark’ value, but may do so independent of elevated autonomic arousal. In other words, they are psychologically and physiologically distinct from autonomic arousal. Unfortunately, this expands the dependent measures for the somatic marker to include all neurological events and their affective representations that somatically mark the value of behavior, and renders the somatic marker near equivalent to the concept of emotion. In this broader interpretation, the somatic marker hypothesis is not specific to a single event and a single cause, but is rather a taxonomy for affective events originating in the central and peripheral nervous systems, but with the added proviso that they are a-priori assumed to mark long term value. It follows that autonomic arousal is only a type of somatic marker, although it is its primary exemplar. Since the somatic marker has been justified and criticized through the IGT experiment and the attendant use of the SCR as the dependent measure, for our purposes a learning based examination of the initiating cause of the SCR and autonomic arousal, namely muscular tension, will be used as a suitable proxy for the somatic marker.

Finally, in the IGT experiment, the dependent variable of autonomic arousal was indirectly measured through the skin conductance response, or SCR. Autonomic arousal in turn was initiated through processes of socialization or learning. However, Damasio did not provide a systematic explanation of arousal and its physiological and cognitive antecedents. That is, the dependent measure of autonomic arousal is an ensemble of processes that include muscular tension, accelerated heart rate, increased biochemical activity, etc., yet the somatic marker hypothesis does not impute the systematic relationship of these changes, and it does not describe how those changes may be modulated as behavioral events by information or learning. In other words, although autonomic arousal as a somatic marker is imputed to be under the control of learning, Damasio fails to define what element of autonomic arousal is in fact learned. To ascertain this requires first a clear definition of the dependent and independent measures denoted by Damasio in the IGT experiment.



The Dependent Measure of Tension

Essentially, sympathetic autonomic arousal is elicited through the sustained contraction of high threshold motor units of the striated musculature, as occurs during running or isometric exercise (Saito et al. 1986). But arousal may also be mediated by the sustained contraction of small low threshold motor units of the striated musculature (Mcguigan,1991) that are generally employed in the maintenance of posture, and can be measured directly through EMG (electromyogram) or through indirect measures of autonomic arousal (e.g., skin conductance response or SCR; galvanic skin response or GSR) elicited by tension. The SCR and GSR are used extensively in bio-feedback relaxation therapies to train muscular relaxation (Yucha & Gilbert 2004). Physiologically it has been well demonstrated that muscular tension instigates autonomic arousal (Gellhorn, 1967, 1972, Jacobson, 1970, Malmo, 1975). Through a bi-directional connection between the reticular arousal system and muscle efferents, a dramatic decrease or increase in muscle activity throughout the body can respectively stimulate decreases or increases in sympathetic arousal. This striated muscle position hypothesis (McGuigan, 1993) holds that the critical controlling event for autonomic arousal is covert neuro-muscular activity, and that arousal is an artifact of striated muscle conditioning rather than vice-versa.

It is characteristic of tension induced arousal that it is often sustained in situations that entail continuous choice in workaday contingencies similar to those imposed by the IGT. However, a more appropriate measure for sustained or tonic levels of tension is not the SCR, which measures transient or phasic responses, but the SCL, or skin conductance level.(The SCR indexes the net or phasic change in sweat gland activity in response to a stimulus or event (e.g., presentation of a picture or a sound), whereas the SCL indexes the basal or tonic level of sweat gland activity.) Because the SCR has been used near exclusively in replications of decision making behavior such as the IGT, this has resulted in the most salient and common attributes of tension escaping observation. Specifically, tonic levels of muscular tension are commonly produced under continuous alternative contingencies or choices and have been generally noted to modulate avoidance behavior. For example, continuous decision making between alternative contingencies (e.g. doing housework or minding a child, working or surfing the internet, etc.) is associated with sustained or tonic levels of tension that is painful and modulates not effective choice, but avoidance. Surnamed the ‘Cinderella Effect’ from the fairy tale character who was first to wake and last to sleep(Wursted et al. 1991, 1996; Hagg, 1991; Lundberg, 1999), the continuous activation of low threshold motor units or muscles (also called Type 1, slow twitch, or Cinderella fibers) because of this psycho-social ‘demand’ causes them to eventually fail, and thus recruit other groups of muscles more peripheral to the original group, resulting in pain and exhaustion. In addition, as the name Cinderella suggests, these slow twitch fibers are slow to deactivate, and will continue activated even during subsequent intervals of rest (Lundberg et al, 2002). The aversive result of this long term activation conforms with McEwen’s model of ‘allostatic load’ (1998), which predicts that tension and arousal will be maladaptive when there is an imbalance between activation and rest/recovery. Specifically, continuous low level or ‘slight’ tension results in overexposure to stress hormones, high blood pressure, and resulting mental and physical exhaustion.
If tension initiates and is sustained by autonomic arousal, and if arousal cannot occur without tension (McGuigan, 1991), it follows that arousal cannot be directly derived through any other proximal cause. Specifically, this means that arousal cannot be directly modulated by changes in information, and thus cannot be a behavioral event. A similar reasoning occurs for states of physiological activation that sustain other behavioral events such as running. Thus running is a behavioral event because it is directly modulated by changes in information, but the rapid heart beat and other changes that are concomitant with running are not directly modulated by information, and represent instead S-R mechanisms that are physiologically elicited to sustain the behavior itself.


The Independent Measure of Discrepancy

According to the somatic marker hypothesis, the independent measures for somatic markers are ‘primary and secondary inducers’. “Primary inducers are innate or learned stimuli that cause pleasurable or aversive states. Once present in the immediate environment, they automatically and obligatorily elicit a somatic response” (e.g. changes in the musculoskeletal system). “Secondary inducers, on the other hand, are entities generated by the recall of a personal or hypothetical emotional event, i.e., “thoughts” and “memories” of the primary inducer, which when brought to working memory elicit a somatic state” (Bechara, 2005). In the case of the IGT experiment, these inducers are represented by the positive and negative connotations, both immediate and deferred of surprising or discrepant changes in the value of individual cards. The IGT experiment entailed an observation of a subject’s performance under separate response contingencies, each signified by manipulations (card flipping) of a separate deck of cards. Performance under a primary contingency, namely pulling cards from a single deck, would result in positive and negative discrepant changes (i.e., good cards and bad cards) that are perceived, and through experience, are expected to be perceived.

The role of unpredicted positive changes in discriminative stimuli is reflected in discrepancy theories of reward or reinforcement (Donahoe & Palmer, 1993, Berridge, 2004) that demonstrate how positive unexpected variances in the functional relationship between behavior and reward co-vary with changes in the activity of dopamine neurons, and code the difference between the expected and actual value of outcomes (Schultz, 1998). Unpredicted negative changes or counterfactual changes in the discriminative function of a stimulus (Camille et al. 2004, Zeelenberg, 1998) perform a similar function by also coding a difference between actual and expected values.

Discrepancy may also be perceived from an estimate of the relative or contrasting goodness of a response. Specifically, discrepant positive or negative variance may be perceived while performing under a primary response contingency, but also concurrently with a discrepant or surprising variance revealed by alternative feasible schedules of reward, as illustrated by the concept of behavioral contrast (Flaherty, 1996). This occurs when the goodness or badness of a reward is determined through its contrast to other response options that are revealed prior or subsequently to choice, and represent feasible opportunity losses or gains. The relative goodness of a response option may be a discrete significant event that is consciously perceived through rumination or worry, or it may represent a discrete yet relatively insignificant event that may be consciously or non-consciously perceived, and represents a ‘distractive’ loss. Distraction will be defined as a small or a series of small imminent feasible (i.e. avoidable/attainable) losses or gains, consciously or non-consciously perceived (e.g., moment to moment feasible loss/gain of access to internet or email while at work). In the many situations when a plenitude of options make their goodness difficult or impossible to logically calculate, choosing one option will more likely result in a subsequent interpretation of discrepant or surprising losses or gains when comparatively better or worse choices are revealed in hindsight. For example, choosing to wait in one check out line among several at a grocery store will result in tension when other lines move faster relative to yours, but will be rewarding and tension free if your line is the fastest.



Negative Discrepancy and Tension

As defined by Damasio (1995), the somatic marker represents a somatic alarm bell for ‘danger’ ahead that is elicited as a Pavlovian or S-R response due to primary or secondary inducers. As reflected in his interpretation of the IGT, this element of danger may be defined as a negative overall outcome, and is uniquely signaled by negative surprising events (i.e. bad card choices). But what is the ultimate signal for tension, the negative card choice alone or the negative value of the overall deck imputed by that choice? Empirical evidence strongly suggests the former. This is due to the fact that ultimate danger in many cases may be recognized yet not signal tension, and that negative counterfactual events are correlated with tension regardless of whether the overall outcome is negative. For example, positive events that also signal danger have no correlation with sustained tension. This premise is supported by empirical observations of behavior that result in not intermittent but continuous surprising positive outcomes. For example, schedules of reinforcement that match demand with skill and thus entail continuous positive surprise or discrepancy (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) in otherwise dangerous situations (e.g., rock climbing, extreme sports) are highly correlated with profound relaxation and low autonomic arousal. As an exception, a high magnitude positive surprise may be associated briefly with elevated SCR that acts as a reflexive startle or orienting response, as when an individual is startled due to the magnitude of surprise (e.g. laughter at a comedy show, joy upon winning the lottery), but this rapidly declines with the habituation of the novel event and is followed by a general reduction of SCR (Lang et al. 1990). On the other hand, reinforcement schedules that entail continuous negative discrepancy (e.g. minding a child, waiting on tables) and do not signal overall danger are associated with elevated autonomic arousal due to tonic levels of tension that is reported as stress or anxiety (Wursted et al. 1991, 1996; Hagg, 1991; Lundberg, 1999). The latter also holds true in situations of behavioral contrast, and particularly when the likelihood of discrepant loss prior or subsequent to choice increases as the number of choices increase or when choices cannot be rationally compared (Marr, 2006) such as in the case of affective vs. rational choices (e.g. comparing the pleasurable value of anticipating eating a donut vs. the rational value of minding a diet). In this latter case, the goodness of a choice is gauged not only because of its intrinsic or long term value, but relative to the affective value of alternative choices. Specifically, positive inducers set up a negative contrast to a reinforcing event by raising the affective salience of low value alternatives. Thus the prospect of eating a donut becomes more salient and its loss more significant contrasted to the value of staying on one’s diet due to the fact that ‘wanting’ it is pleasurable. Similarly, when a positive event (e.g. opening a Christmas present) lies in the immediately future, the present moment becomes a lot less valuable compared to what lies ahead, thus causing tension that prompts one to move faster towards a goal, as one ‘can hardly wait’. This contrast effect explains why positive inducers are often correlated with tension, and why positive inducers that do not have contrasting alternatives (e.g., flow experiences) have no correlation with tension at all.

Finally, as elicited by the behavioral contrast between rational and/or affective events, tension cannot predict overall value, and occurs independently of the overall outcome or value of the primary contingency. For example, choosing one pair of shoes among a myriad options at a clothing store will more likely result in tension upon the subsequent appraisal of options foregone or that will be foregone, and not because of the value of the original purchasing decision. This ‘tyranny of choice’ (Schwartz, 2004) has been repeatedly demonstrated by social psychological observations of the correlation of tension, anxiety, and stress with multiple choices.



The Role of Affect
The observation that the anticipation of negative surprising events or discrepancies is uniquely correlated with tonic (SCL) muscular tension and associated autonomic arousal can also be described if discrepancy and sustained tension (including of course the neuro-physiological systems they modulate) are denoted as not just informative events, but also as an equivalent hedonic or affective events. That is, discrepancy and tension not only denote information about means-ends expectancies but also represent painful or pleasurable affective states that in themselves modulate behavior in ways that may not be coherent with rational behavior. Specifically, the affective aspect of discrepancy and the fact that it signals other somatic responses conforms with Damasio’s concept of the primary and secondary inducers, which are defined as stimuli that unconditionally, or through learning (e.g., conditioning and semantic knowledge), can (consciously or nonconsciously) produce states that are pleasurable or aversive (Bechara et al. 2003), and signals other subsequent somatic responses.

To understand affect, it is important to understand its semantics. It is an unremarkable fact in science that identical processes may have different corresponding and equally valid metaphorical representations (Lakoff & Johnson,1999). Thus aspects of vision may be represented by the activity of rods and cones in the retina and attendant neural processes, or may be more simply and no less accurately denoted as the perception of colors such as red, blue, and green. Similarly, the metaphorical representation of the processes of tension and associated arousal can also be represented through the metaphor of aversive or painful states. This reported ‘feeling’ is defined as affect. More remarkable however is the fact that discrepant events are affective events as well, and are also reported as pleasurable or painful. Unpredicted positive and negative changes (Shepperd & McNulty, 2002) in the discriminative function of a stimulus respectively result in self reports of elation or depression, and the experience of negative discrepant events (e.g. embarrassment, regret) as well as negative affect derived from the peripheral nervous system (e.g. having a tooth pulled) also correlates with the affective event of muscular tension and corresponding approach or avoidance behavior (Mellers & McGraw, 2001, Miller, 1992). Also, as discussed earlier, positive discrepant events that establish a negative contrasting loss are also correlated with muscular tension. In addition, the modeling or ‘visualization’ of future positive or negative discriminative events may elicit an approximation of a response before it’s eliciting stimuli actually occur. The elicitation of the sensory and motor elements of a response by this ‘secondary induction’ or ‘anticipation’ is also called priming (Donahoe & Palmer, 1993). Thus a student may feel euphoric or depressed in anticipation of a respective likelihood of a good or bad failing mark in a class, and psychotherapeutic outcomes rely upon changing patterns of thoughts to those that elicit positively affective emotional primes (e.g. optimistic thinking). Finally, as experience demonstrates, pain or pleasure scales with the relative importance and duration of a counterfactual event or events. Thus, bad news ‘hurts’ more and good news feels better as these events scale in magnitude. Also, as the Cinderella effect demonstrates, a continuous succession of small negative feasible counterfactual events (i.e., distractions) can cause severe tension induced pain and emotional distress as a distractive day at work or minding the children calls to mind.

Negative affect may be generated by the peripheral or central nervous systems, and originates from physiological (pain from muscular tension or physical trauma) or cognitive (negative discrepancy or ‘disappointment’) or distractive causes. However, the function of pain, regardless of its source, is generally regarded as not representational but imperative. That is, the function of pain is not to inherently represent the advisability of specific action plans but rather to interrupt and redirect attention, and impose a new action priority to escape (Eccleston & Crombez, 1999). That is, pain signals the molecular moment to moment goodness of an individual response rather than the molar goodness of a response set. Given this fact, it follows that the pain of tension (as measured indirectly by the SCR and SCL) logically serves the same function, which is not to help parse long term decisions (as per Damasio’s interpretation) but to set a new priority for short term decisions that lead to escape.

Although negative affect or the continuous anticipation of negative affect correlates with the affective state of tension, the experience or continuous anticipation of positive affect does not. Like pain, positive affect connotes molecular or moment to moment goodness rather than the long term or molar value of behavior. And as with pain, the momentary goodness may or may not cohere with the overall goodness of behavior. As mentioned earlier, in ‘flow experiences’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) such as creative behavior that represent a succession of moment to moment positive discrepancies or surprises and attendant pleasurable affect, relaxation or low autonomic arousal is commonly reported. This positive affect gives value to momentary behavior independent of its long term or extrinsic results. Specifically, in humanistic and social psychology, positive affect elicited by moment to moment behavior represents the intrinsically reinforcing or ‘autotelic’ aspect of that behavior, where you do it for the sake of doing it, and has no bearing on the valuation of the rational or ‘extrinsic’ value of behavior and has no correlation with increased tension or anxiety (Deci & Ryan, 1995).

Nonetheless, as experience reveals, positive and negative discrepancies are rarely continuous, and as ‘bad or good news’ can populate any experience, resulting in a conflation of pain, pleasure, and correlating tension. This ‘eustress’ may represent the intermittent affect elicited by bad and good news that follows one’s attention to the varying fortunes of a sports team during a game, or the pleasure that may result from a choice and the pain of the opportunity loss that is perceived prospective to making a choice or momentarily after a choice. One aspect of this is that it is easy to conflate the causal attributes of pain and pleasure, and associate tension induced affect as an intrinsic attribute of the positive attributes of a situation rather than the negative. Thus the common belief, originating with Selye (1980), that tension or stress can be elicited by desirable events to enhance or ‘energize’ performance.

Finally, the motivational systems that mediate discrepancy based affect are different psychologically and neurologically from the cognitive act-outcome expectancies that mediates rational goal making (Berridge, 2001), and therefore it follows that affect does not inherently denote effect, but rather constitutes an unconditioned response to abstract properties of the contingency, or more concisely, is a schedule effect. Thus, affect does not denote long term (or normative) value, but rather short term or moment to moment value. In other words, although positive affect may cohere with and enhance (or somatically mark) the importance of long term goals, this coherence is not implicit in affect but rather is an artifact of how discrepancy or novelty is rendered through the schedule of reinforcement. That is, affect is not rendered by the normative properties of a schedule or its end result, but rather by the abstract properties of a schedule, or how discrepancy or surprise is arranged. For example, piece work or fixed ratio schedules of reinforcement require reward to follow fixed and predictable performance before the onset of reward, and are generally regarded by the subject as boring or emotionally painful. However, if perceived progress under the same contingency is unpredictable, then performance is regarded as interesting and pleasurable, even if the long term results are known by the subject to be negative. For example, a teacher reinforces a child’s progress in reading through unpredicted praise, and the child’s positive feelings are coherent with successfully learning to read. But this reinforcement is due to the teacher making sure that praise and it’s accompanying positive affect is coherent with the long term goal of learning to read. Positive affect thus motivates good behavior because it is designed to do so, and not because it intrinsically denotes the overall correctness of choice. Likewise, a casino operator reinforces a gambler’s activity through a succession of small successive wins (which mitigate the occasional large loss), but also ensures that the gambler’s positive feelings towards gambling in the here and now are dis-coherent with his objective knowledge pf his long term prospects. Similarly, an individual may adjust the difficulty of a game to provide enough positive surprise to make the game pleasing and thus motivating, or he may engineer a similar contingency by proverbially waiting until the last minute to do a task, thus insuring that positive surprise (and affect) will motivate him to get to work on time, complete his taxes, etc. In these cases, affect is designed to occur after the fact or knowledge of the correct behavior. Finally, in a variant of the IGT surnamed the Soochow Gambling Task or SGT,(Lin et al. 2007, Chiu et al. 2008), it was demonstrated that the choice of card deck was determined by the frequency of small positive variations in the reinforcement schedule during the performance, resulting in choice that was independent of the expected overall value of the performance outcome.

Thus it may be hypothesized that regardless of whether it is mediated by the central or peripheral nervous system or is positive or negative in nature, no affective event can independently determine or predict rationally conceived long term or molar value. That is, and contrary to Damasio’s hypothesis, so called gut feelings alone cannot predetermine the adequacy of long term decisions. (As a qualifying note, the concept of ‘gut decisions’ may be taken literally or metaphorically. Indeed, decisions made non-consciously through solely cognitive operations are often termed gut level decisions even when affect is not present.)


Originality and Limitations of the IGT

The IGT was designed to track overt and covert responses under alternative contingencies wherein reinforcement is variable or uncertain. Yet, measuring such choice-choice behavior under uncertainty is not new either in terms of the experimental paradigm or in terms of its dependent measures. Indeed, using the SCR to measure covert responding under similar conditions of choice provided the experimental foundation of the Dollard and Miller theory of anxiety (Miller, 1992). What is new is that the somatic events indirectly measured by the SCR were imputed to modulate the effectiveness of long term choice rather than short term avoidance, and that Damasio renders a sophisticated neurological rather than learning based explanation of the SCR. Another more serious problem is that the dependent measures of the IGT, namely the ‘gut level’ responses, are incomplete both for Damasio’s original experiment and its subsequent replications.
As derived from the IGT, the somatic marker hypothesis imputes that an affective ‘gut level’ somatic response (i.e., tension mediated autonomic arousal) results from the appraisal of surprising counterfactual outcomes or discrepancies that are implicit in choice. However, the immediate perception as well as anticipation (priming) of these outcomes is also affective, and this affect is mediated by the neuro-modulator activity (e.g., activity of midbrain dopamine systems) that modulates choice. Thus not one but two ‘gut level’ affective responses may occur in tandem across performance under the IGT. Specifically, neurally based affect as elicited by the perception of decision-outcome discrepancy or priming effects due to the anticipation of discrepancy is generally not addressed in the experimental measures of the somatic states that are induced by the IGT and its various experimental iterations. This is all the more remarkable since an immediate discrepancy and the priming or anticipation of discrepancy may be presumed to act respectively as primary and secondary inducers of somatic markers (Bechara et. al, 2003). But this is not a limitation of the IGT but of the observational tools that may be applied concurrently with the experiment. As originally implemented, the IGT represents an experimental ‘snapshot’ of the covert and overt behavior concomitant with decision making or choice. However, in studies that replicate the IGT, only a subset use psycho-physiological data (Dunn, 2006), and these data generally use indirect measures of muscular tension as indicated by the SCR. The unique psycho-physiological affective responses due to the actual and anticipated perception of positive or negative discrepancy as a subject chooses cards are not measured or represented as affective states. The IGT was also designed to minimize tonic muscular activation by scheduling choice opportunities to follow the return of autonomic arousal to a base level (Dunn, 2006). This removes from consideration the continuous choice opportunities which are characteristic of workaday activities and the tonic levels of muscular tension that these activities induce. Secondly, because the negative discrepancy following a card choice is of low consequence (loss of play money), tonic muscular activation is also reduced. For example, in similar choice experiments conducted in 1940's utilizing mild electric shock as the consequence of a wrong choice, Neal Miller (1971) noted that high and sustained muscular tension lead to the moment to moment aversion of choice, and utilized the data to derive the Dollard and Miller theory of anxiety, which posited that tension based arousal mediated avoidance behavior. Third, even when tonic muscular tension is measured, muscular load as represented by the Cinderella effect is not captured since the SCL measures basal skin conductance, not the allostatic load due to the sequential recruitment of the musculature. Because of this, the affective (painful) nature of sustained muscular activity is not revealed. Because the affective nature of tonic levels of muscular tension is not considered, the SCL and SCR have been interpreted as performing a signaling function that instigates the parsing of choice rather than an affective function that instigates the avoidance of choice. This represents a serious omission in the experimental investigation of the somatic marker, since all the relevant affective events occurring due to choice are not considered.

Overall, in decision making peripheral and neurologically based affective responses often occur in tandem, yet no experiments have measured their correlation with the experimental contingencies that underlay choice. Thus the covert responses that mediate choice between alternative contingencies are measured separately through measures of the source of peripheral (e.g., muscular tension) based affect (e.g. EKG, SCR), or in-vivo brain imaging (Berridge,2004) that measure the source of neurologically based affect (e.g., activity of dopamine neurons). However, none have measured them together as events that co-vary across time and performance (i.e. through a within group experimental design characteristic of Skinnerian behavior analysis). The question is how covert and overt behavior under the IGT or in a more general sense alternative response contingencies or ‘decision making’ can be explained through an integration of the data provided by both of these experimental perspectives as reflected in the comprehensive perspective of a radical behaviorism.


Validity of the Somatic Marker Hypothesis

The somatic marker theory is attractive because it’s major underlying premise matches the guidance of intuition, namely that gut level or affective responses in themselves mediate the goodness of long term choice. But in this regard it is entirely false. Whether perceived as a positive or negative event, affect only mediates short term approach or avoidance. Secondly, the primary and secondary inducers that instigate somatic events are elicited by abstract rather than normative properties of contingencies. In other words, the discrepancy based affect that induces somatic responses is dependent upon how reinforcement is scheduled to follow performance rather than the fact that it does follow performance. Thus not only does affect not modulate effective long term choice, but it is never initiated by information that is derived from a conscious or non conscious appraisal of long term events.

Ultimately, somatic events do mark and change the course of behavior, and are influenced by learning. Nonetheless, if they can only mediate short term choice, the somatic marker hypothesis as derived from the IGT experiment must be entirely reconceived.


Assembling an Explanation

The lessons of the IGT experiment as informed by data regarding the affective neuroscience of choice are simple. First, the negatively affective (i.e. painful) states of tension and autonomic arousal correlate with and precede or attend the occurrence of a negative discrepancy that also is represented affectively as painful. Secondly, if pain has an imperative and not representational quality, then the somatic marker of tension mediates not effective decision making, but decisions that can facilitate avoidance or escape from the painful entailments of tension based arousal. Third, if tension is behavioral, then it and its opposite state of relaxation is dependent upon the arrangement of information as denoted by response contingencies.

These hypotheses have four major and testable entailments.

1. If anticipated pain elicits tension, then tension will occur regardless of the source of that pain.

Pain may originate with abstract information that is processed cognitively by cortically instantiated processes (perception, or thinking) or by input from the peripheral nervous system. For example, an individual may become tense in anticipation of finding out a likely poor course grade, or in anticipation of having a tooth pulled. Both are painful, and as common experience demonstrates, elicit tension based arousal when they are anticipated.

2 . If avoidance or escape cannot occur or will certainly occur, tension will not occur.

If avoidance or escape is perceived as impossible or impractical, loss will still occur but will be rendered non-feasible and will not correlate with tension. Non-feasible losses are defined as imminent opportunity losses or beneficial response options or choices that by habit or circumstance cannot respectively be avoided or performed. For example, while at work we possess the option to leave to see a movie, fly to Paris, or go fishing, but habit or circumstance leads us to be unconcerned about their loss, or feasibility. However, when we are planning a vacation when a choice between such outcomes is incumbent, then choosing between similar response options does represent a cause for feasible loss and tension. Similarly, as perceived imminent feasible loss becomes non feasible due to experience or ‘extinction’, tension will correspondingly decrease. Thus a student who is experiencing test anxiety becomes less anxious if avoidance is eliminated through a ‘time out’ (Gresham & Kern, 2004) that extinguishes tension by reducing the prospect of avoiding prospective loss. Although the student may still experience loss and the regret it entails, muscular tension declines when the student realizes it cannot be reinforced. Similarly, individuals who perceive the likelihood of a significant loss of life or property (e.g. a hurricane or disease) will feel tense when there is still a prospect that the loss will be avoided, and merely regretful or depressed when they know it cannot. Also, when avoidance from physical pain is impossible, as in the case of ‘learned helplessness’ (Seligman, 1975; Gatchel et al. 1977), low autonomic arousal is characteristic.
Finally, when avoidance is certain, tension will also not occur. For example, whereas an inescapable electric shock renders the subject (in this case an experimental animal such as a dog) (Seligman, 1975) ‘helpless’ and relatively anxiety free, completely avoidable painful events (e.g. avoiding a dangling power line seen from a distance) are similarly tension free. Similarly, game animals are nonchalant when they knowingly keep a safe distance from predators that are seen and are thus predictable in the distance.

3. Tension or relaxation occur independent of the level of task demand.

In commonly accepted explanations for tension or stress (Selye, 1980), the source of stress is any type of demand represented by not physical but cognitive operations. That is, much as physical demands (e.g. running, exercising) cause ‘wear and tear’ on the body, cognitive demands (continuous cognitive appraisal or thinking) cause a similar wear and tear represent by systemic autonomic arousal or ‘stress’. Notably, this has been implicitly challenged by well known and amply tested relaxation protocols such as mindfulness meditation (Kabat-Zinn, 1993) that presume that relaxation is induced by a the restructuring rather than avoidance of ruminative thought (e.g. a thought as just a thought).
Moreover, high cognitive demand as represented by complex cognition often occurs with relaxation, and relaxation is necessary to optimize cognition. Indeed, effective thinking more often has a negative rather than positive correlation with tension. For example, declarative reasoning is enhanced during states of rest (Grecius et al. , 2003, Raichle et al., 2001), thus leading to the opposite conclusion that tension is deleterious to effective thinking. Proprioceptive feedback from the musculature is not required for problem solving (Rolls, 1999, Taub et al. 1966, Teuber, 1972), and executive attention and conscious feeling are not interdependent but are dissociable events (Naccache et al. 2004). Finally, patients with pure autonomic failure who cannot generate integrated peripheral responses reported unimpaired motivational decision making, emotional processing, and social cognition (Heims, 2004).

In a critical overview of the relevant literature on Damasio’s hypothesis, Dunn concluded (2006) that peripheral feedback and associated arousal does not reliably influence decision making accuracy, and may reflect the end product of decision making rather than a key feature in its development. Finally, although it is commonly expected that tension will occur in high demand cognitive activities, this is not the case when feasible loss is absent. During high demand activities (e.g. creating art, climbing mountains) that perfectly match with skill and hence entail no feasible loss, low arousal or muscular relaxation is commonly reported (Perry, 1997).


4. Arousal is not unitary.

Arousal is a theoretically incoherent term, as it may apply to distinctive neuro-physiological processes (Robbins, 1997) that have equally distinctive causes. Yet, in contemporary accounts of performance motivation and arousal (Easterwood, 1959, Damasio, 1995), and indeed all contemporary commentary and experiment on the somatic marker hypothesis, these processes are not separated or controlled for, resulting in the confounding of their differing respective causes and effects. Thus, although neurologic arousal as marked by heightened alertness may or may not occur concurrently with the somatic response of tension and autonomic arousal, both are commonly combined and used as a practically indivisible state of arousal. For example, attentive arousal felt when watching a football game or riding a roller coaster often occurs concurrently with tension based arousal, forming a species of stress or ‘eustress’ from the conflation of two psychologically and physiologically distinct events. Similarly, an individual may compare multiple positive surprising outcomes, and may be tense (or excited) due to the contrasting choices, yet still be positively aroused due to the positive outcome itself. Thus, his subjective excitement or ‘joy’ describes two separate arousal states that are induced by two separate causes. Distractive events may also represent eustress, as a worker may be positively aroused by choosing to view his email, and concurrently tense due to the concurrent loss of productivity. Indeed, the classic inverted U curve (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908, Easterbrook, 1959) correlating the relationship between performance and arousal is better explained through the recognition that arousal in incentive motivation may represent not one but two separate dependent variables that co-vary with different independent causes.

For example, if task performance is plotted across the level of demand, the likelihood of moment to moment discrepant gain would at first offset the likelihood of loss, a circumstance that would reverse itself as demand increases. Thus, as a function of increasing demand, alertness and performance increases, but eventually decreases with a corresponding rise in tension due to an increased rate of ‘bad news’ implicated by high demand. Yet high demand does not necessarily implicate difficult or unattainable performance. Indeed, as earlier argued, remove the negative but not the positive discrepancy entailed by moment to moment performance and retain the demand for performance, and tension and autonomic arousal will not increase with demand, and high demand will correlate with a steady state of relaxation and low autonomic arousal. In addition, performance will not trail off and deteriorate with demand, but increase, and corresponding affect will be positive and quite pleasurable. This resulting ‘flow’ experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) thus demonstrates how escalating demand increases alertness and performance, yet when negative discrepancy is eliminated, increasing demand will not result in increased autonomic arousal (or stress) and decrements in performance as the Yerkes-Dodson model predicts.


A New Synthesis

In sum, tension induced autonomic arousal occurs to somatically mark future uncertain and imminently avoidable negative affective events that in turn originate from the peripheral (pain, as in dental office) or central nervous systems (cognitive discrepancy, such as losing or anticipating losing one’s job, or consistent distractions at work). Because it is affective, tension occurs and is reinforced by any decision that results in avoidance of future pain or escape from present pain, and not decisions made by other normative or rational criteria. That is, as painful events, tension and arousal are not representational, but imperative. Tension marks the anticipated goodness of moment to moment responding rather than long term ends.

Unlike priming responses (e.g. positive affect due to thinking optimistic thoughts) which are elicited independently of action (or subsequent reinforcement), the affective response of tension is emitted because it is reinforced by action (namely successful avoidance), and thus is a conditioned response, or is behavioral. Relaxation is thus predicted to be coextensive with the consistent avoidance of feasible loss. Finally, although tension occurs concomitant with choice, periodic choices (e.g. choosing an item from a dinner menu), allow the autonomic nervous system to gradually return to a homeostatic resting state. However, if choice occurs from moment to moment (e.g. continuous choosing during the working day between surfing the internet or working), then as the Cinderella effect predicts, tension will be tonically sustained and result in the physiological and emotional concomitants of stress. In other words, although phasic neuro-muscular activity occurs with periodic choice, tonic neuro-muscular activity is a function of continuous or moment to moment choice; and it is the latter that is commonly associated with the classic symptoms of stress.

This position that tension mediates avoidance conforms with Zajonc’s (1998) argument that emotions are designed to help individuals make approach-avoidance distinctions, and more specifically, that tension based arousal or ‘anxiety’ (Mowrer, 1939, Miller, 1992) is reinforced through its mediation of the avoidance of future painful events. This position contrasts with the true-false determinations that are mediated by Damasio’s somatic marker (Damasio, 1995). Finally, the fact that tension embodies an affective quality distinguishes the hypothesis from the computational role assigned by Damasio. That is, tension does not mark value because it is perceived, but rather it marks value because it is perceived to hurt. This affective value of tension and tension induced arousal serves as a mechanism to interrupt and redirect cognitive processing by bypassing rather than enhancing cognitive filtering and thus expediting action leading to avoidance or escape (Lowenstein et al., 2001, Armony et al., 1997). It is through this facilitation of action that tension is reinforced.

The presumption that tension is instigated by choice and is reinforced by successful avoidance also conforms with social psychological findings regarding the rationality of decision making. As commonly conceived, tension based arousal is mediated by stimulus-response (S-R) processes, and tension respectively diminishes with successful avoidance (i.e. flight or fight) (Seyle, 1980) or when decisions are successfully parsed or made (Damasio, 1995). But social psychological data do not support either of these positions. In fact, the experience of tension based arousal is mediated by future alternative outcomes or choice, not demand. Moreover, tension induced by multiple decisions or choices mediates not effective choice but the avoidance of choice, and does not serve formal principles of rationality (Keys & Schwartz, 2007). It thus follows that since choice avoidance is modulated by contingent future outcomes or reinforcers, tension must represent not an S-R response, but an R-S or operant behavior.

As a final note, it must be remarked that this conceptualization is not new, and returns the analysis of tension to the seminal concepts of Sigmund Freud. Specifically, Freud’s concept of ‘signal anxiety’ (Wong, 1999) posited like Damasio that tension based arousal unconsciously signaled ‘danger’ ahead. But in contrast to Damasio, the results do not make for better choices, but are a cause for avoidance of overt or covert (i.e., repressing thoughts about an object) behavior. That is, tension results in the avoidance of the momentary pain of tension rather than informing the goodness of long term behavior. Subsequently, in a series of experiments involving choice utilizing the SCR as the dependent measure for tension, Neal Miller (1992) reframed the Freudian role of anxiety within a learning perspective, and the resulting Dollard and Miller hypothesis for anxiety posited that the affective (i.e. painful) event of tension occurs in anticipation of physically or emotionally painful events and is reinforced by successful avoidance. Ironically, the Dollard and Miller hypothesis did not gain prominence in large measure because of its simplicity (Bolles, 1994), a salient characteristic that it shares with the equally simple but much more notable hypothesis of the somatic marker. Finally, as with Damasio’s hypothesis, a learning based explanation of muscular tension conforms with the modern widely accepted generalized and updated versions of the James-Lange hypothesis (James, 1894), which propose that bodily signals bi-directionally interact with other forms of cortically instantiated information rather than the former being the determining factor (Dalgleish, 2004).


Tension and Stress

As derived from the IGT experiment, the concept of tension as a somatic marker forces us to rethink the nature of the covert state of muscular tension as not a reflexive but a behavioral or conditioned response. This statement is not necessarily in contradiction to the somatic marker hypothesis itself, which predicates that learning is strongly implicated in the display of covert somatic states. Nonetheless, inferred neurological events are burdened by Damasio with nearly the entire explanation for the somatic marker. This approach, common among psychologists, “limits the possibilities for prediction and control by foreclosing on the pragmatically balanced analysis of how environment circumstances contribute to a given behavioral event” (Moore, 2007). In the case of the somatic marker, this means that the relationship of environmental contingencies to the display of covert somatic behavior is unexplored in deference to the construction of complex neurological models engaging different organelles in the brain. Although in fairness, this may be due in part to Damasio’s core hypothesis that the somatic marker is due to temporally distant outcomes in the future and past that cannot be systematically examined or controlled.

Yet, in contradistinction to Damasio’s hypothesis, tension and autonomic arousal change the value not of long term but of moment to moment responding, which may or may not cohere with rational long term goals. This makes the theory eminently testable under a contingency analysis since tension is originated and controlled by immediately contingent outcomes. Thus, by attributing tension and accompanying arousal to the perception of feasible and affective losses both large and small (i.e. distractive losses), tension becomes a function not of demand but of the feasibility of the avoidance of discrete stimulus events. Thus to be relaxed requires a complete revision of what relaxation entails and its opposite state of tension based arousal or stress.

In his class, the psychologist F. J. McGuigan (1993) would induce relaxation in his students through the technique of progressive relaxation. He would then drop a book to demonstrate how the startle reflex and related tension and associated arousal is inhibited or impossible without the presence of muscular tonus, a finding originally made by Sherrington (1909) and explained neurologically by Gellhorn (1967,1972). However, although all remedies for stress posit relaxation as the necessary antidote for and indeed opposite of stress, the dependent measures for stress in almost all academic opinion represents various measures of arousal as reflected in self reports and physiological and neurological indices (e.g. GSR, EEG). But by confusing the myriad subjective and objective symptoms of stress with its uniform neuro-muscular source, the concept of stress is rendered theoretically incoherent, since there is no one consistent dependent or independent measure for stress that all parties can agree. The result is that stress becomes merely a taxonomy for all non-specific arousal caused by non-specific stimuli categorized by ‘demand’ rather than a clearly defined behavioral response, and renders a panoply of cures that are in some respects worse than the disease.

Before the advent of modern medicine, disease was thought to be caused by an overabundance of impurities or ‘plethoras’ in the blood, and was treated by nostrums such as blood letting that generally caused more harm than good. It was only when illness was redefined by metaphorical representations of discrete viral and bacterial causes that allowed for a scientifically valid therapeutic focus on the prevention and treatment of disease. Similarly, the governing metaphor of tension or stress is that it is a product of an abundance or plethora of demand (Selye, 1980) and that relaxation is a function of reducing the daily demands of life, by means of vacations or pursuing non demanding diversions at home or work. Yet by adding continuous feasible choices in the place of demanding ones, we increase also feasible losses. Thus we retreat from a world of complexity to a world of ever proliferating distractive and worrisome (ruminative) choices, and end up as the Cinderella effect suggests in a state of perpetual tension and emotional exhaustion. Furthermore, by eliminating all demand rather than controlling for aspects of demand, relaxation becomes a mere product of physically and mentally escaping from our troubles, and not an accompanying trait of an active and demanding lifestyle. Specifically, for the day to day stresses created by a world of boundless choices, relaxation is not just a function of radically reducing or restructuring ruminative thought (e.g. meditation, mindfulness mediation), but of radically reducing distraction. That is, because of the ubiquitous choices in the modern world, radically reducing distractive judgements or choices is not incidental to the induction of relaxation, it is fundamental.

This last proscription is novel theoretically, but as an effective therapeutic practice it is ironically commonplace. Because tonic neuro-muscular activity engages a specific class of muscular fibers that are activated easily by even slight distraction and decrease but gradually when eliciting stimuli are removed, the most effective therapeutic interventions that can reduce and eliminate tension must continuously eliminate not rumination but distraction. This intervention is a major component in meditative practices such as mindfulness meditation, the relaxation response, and concentrative meditation, wherein distraction is implicitly eliminated across significant intervals of time. However, the role of distraction has never been explicitly controlled for in meditation research, which has attributed the reduction of tension to the manipulation of conscious rumination (mindfulness meditation) or through obscure S-R mechanisms entailed through attentional focus (concentrative meditation, relaxation response). Indeed, only recently have studies begun to investigate feasible (i.e., distractive loss, rumination) loss as a separate qualitative aspect of cognition that may be used as an independent measure of tension and relaxation rather than task demand. These preliminary findings have lead to the observation that the ability to reduce distraction is a ‘unique mechanism by which mindfulness meditation reduces distress’ (Jain et al., 2007).

Finally, the methodology of learning theory (as exemplified by experimental designs such as the IGT) allows for the analysis of the fine grain co-variations between stimuli and behavior for single subjects mapped across trials (i.e. a ‘within’ group experimental design), and can uniquely demonstrate how practice variables or experience modulate tension and predict its future occurrence. Such co-variations have generally not been considered as independent measures of tension either experimentally or descriptively, and are subsumed under molar concepts such as ‘attention’ or ‘demand’ that can only be imperfectly described through the use of literal language. This is reflected in the many disparate and conflicting definitions of stress. Learning theory mitigates this problem by establishing a much greater precision in the description of the independent variables that correlate with tension and stress. Specifically, if the fine grain or molecular metaphor of ‘choice’ replaces the molar metaphor of ‘demand’ as the primary descriptor of the etiology of tension, then the management of simple contingencies of reinforcement are implicated in a much more precise and uniform description of the origin, prediction, and control of the operational measures of everyday stress. But this avenue has scarcely been researched due in no small measure to the rejection or neglect of the experimental methodology of learning theory as a necessary tool for the analysis of stress. Nonetheless, this argument is won not by the parsimony and precision of a learning based explanation, but through the power of procedure to effect behavioral change. That of course is the mandate and justification of a true science of behavior.

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The Self-less Gene: Mentalism, Memetics, and Biobehavioral Psychology

How do individuals make decisions, and why do they make the decisions they do? The metaphorical conventions of common language are generally thought of as suitable to describe behavior, and to provide the rules whereby we can navigate our worlds. According to common sense, decision making follows symbolic rules that manipulate discrete mental objects or mental faculties. The actual molecular or neural processes that are responsible for behavior are generally ignored, since their logic is generally isomorphic to these larger scale symbolic rules. Thus on large and small scales, the human mind is a simple information processor, and like a computer program follows the same logical rules irrespective of the perspective you take. Recently, evolutionary psychology has added a nativistic element to this basic model. Thus natural selection shapes our sensitivity to certain information, and our behavior is subtly guided towards ends that maximize our individual genetic ‘fittedness’.

The well-established belief that decision-making is entirely dependent upon the manipulation of symbolic mental objects that may or may not be influenced by inborn tendencies is integral to philosophical beliefs that permeate both common sense and academic views of behavior. It also has entailed philosophical problems that have consumed the attention of thoughtful and thought-less people since the beginning of recorded history. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that arguments regarding materialism, moral justification, virtue, etc. basically derive from implicit and incorrect assumptions as to how elementary decision making is made. I will begin with an analysis of the logic of so called mentalistic and memetic models of decision making, and the logical and methodological rules that support them. In addition to these ‘molar’ explanations, ‘molecular’ or bio-behavioral explanations for decision making will be provided. These explanations will be demonstrated to detail the elemental processes that instigate and sustain behavior. These processes explain behavior with greater economy and strong empirical rigor, and ironically justify as reasonable and correct the many human values that are normally attributed to unreasoning sentiment.

Mentalism: The Rule of Common Sense

Common sense, or the rules of behavior we commonly internalize through language, attributes behavior to the conscious or nonconscious manipulation of ordinary events. A multitude of stimuli impinge upon our senses, and are encoded in our minds as physical objects that embody a four dimensional space. Thus we compose a gallery of physical and abstract objects such as cars and houses, time and distance that make up our mental space. We cognitively manipulate these ideas, and this information feeds forward and results in overt behavior. The sensory information from overt behavior then feeds back to the mind, which acts again according to the new information, and the mind-behavior loop continues on. However, common sense does not tell us how we behave, or why our behavior does not match what our common sense tells us we should do. Thus we all know that success follows hard work, perseverance, and the ability to follow reason, but often reason is not enough. So we hypothesize obscure mental processes or ‘faculties’ such as courage, willpower, feeling, virtue, etc. to fill in the explanatory gaps in our understanding and prediction of behavior. These faculties may be aroused and summoned, controlled and channeled through an appeal to reason. Motivational speeches, pop psychology books, and inspirational creeds all claim to change behavior through such reasonable appeals to the summoning and reordering of these mental events. Thus changing behavior is just a matter of summoning courage, building willpower, deciding to forgive, expressing love, etc.

Because mental goods are understood as discrete and disembodied mental or physical events, happiness is thus defined as attaining those goods, and not through the process that they are attained. Thus, humans seek a steady or ‘homeostatic’ state that represents ‘having it all’. Of course, humans never do ‘have it all’, and thus our behavior is composed of a series of fits and starts between needing and having.

Mentalistic versus Memetic Thinking

The common sense attribution of behavior to the ordering of mental events, or mentalism, has been traditionally bound with the assumption that our thoughts are ordered according to the diverse agendas of culture. Thus in some cultures monogamy and communal sharing may be important, and in other cultures polygamy and private property may be valued. Value in another words is entirely malleable, and there are for the most part few if any standards whereby cultural values may be judged.

In recent years, this belief has been challenged by the discovery of many behavioral traits or tendencies in humans that occur across cultures, and persist often in spite of cultural proscriptions. These tendencies are not learned, but innate, and are the products of processes of natural selection that have operated over millions of years. These tendencies form the subject matter of evolutionary psychology. The fundamental theorem upon which evolutionary psychology is based is "that behavior is in large part inherited and that every organism acts (consciously or not) to enhance its inclusive fitness – to increase the frequency and distribution of its selfish genes in future generations." (Miele, 1996) Men and women have different biological agendas that result in behavioral tendencies towards promiscuity, competitiveness, nurturing, etc. The values that we conceive in language are in turn ultimately derived from innate predispositions to interpret and respond to information in certain ways. Although values and the behavior they engender are ultimately a function of neural processes, the relative inaccessibility of these processes to observation and their sheer complexity forces a reliance on molar decision making processes that are denoted by a metaphorical language. This language borrows metaphors from biology, and in particular genetic and disease metaphors. According to this ‘memetic’ language, ideas or memes occur and are fashioned in ways not dissimilar from how a virus replicates and spreads, and are selected, mutate, and are discarded because of selectionist processes that form an analogue to Darwinian natural selection. Coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins (1976), memes are a different type of replicator that exists in minds.

Like their mentalistic counterpart of an idea, a meme is chosen according to a molar selectionistic principle, but is guided instead by nativistic (i.e. inborn) tendencies that have been chosen over the eons by natural selection. In other words, memetics is nothing more than mentalism couched in the metaphors of biology, but with a provision for hereditary constraints on how behavior may be exhibited. Memetics adds to mentalism by postulating a nativistic or evolutionary as well as cultural origin for behavior. However, it shares with mentalism the idea that behavior occurs because of the manipulation of disembodied intellectual objects, and the goal of behavior is in acquiring the intellectual and physical artifacts that once possessed promote happiness, and in the long view, provide biological fittedness.

Mentalistic and memetic descriptions of behavior involve metaphorical languages that are built on similar philosophical assumptions. These are that behavior is goal directed (homeostatic), disembodied (somatic or emotional influences are relatively unimportant or extraneous determinants of behavior), and molar (discrete mental objects or faculties motivate). Memetics of course adds a distinctive metaphorical language based on disease and genetic metaphors, and recognizes the constraining influence of nativistic or inborn tendencies that have been selected by evolution. However, a problem that arises is that a belief in these assumptions implicitly undermines the perceived usefulness of the experimental methods that may be used to disprove them. Just as the belief that the sun rotated the earth made it seem to be a fruitless affair to turn a telescope to the skies, so too do memetic and mentalistic belief systems preclude the use of the procedures that may effectively prove them ungrounded, and thus groundless.

Mentalism and memetic explanations are products of the ways in which we commonly question our own behavior, but those explanations in turn determine the ways that we will frame those questions, and in turn the questions themselves. This forms a vicious circle that excludes entire classes of questions from consideration. Thus, because behavior is disembodied, there is no need to ask how behavior may be anchored to neural or somatic events that could influence or bias decision-making. Secondly, because discrete large scale or molar events determine behavior, a general determinant for behavior becomes equivalent in predictive power to specific determinants of behavior. Therefore there is little or no need to delineate the specific causes that drive individual behavior. An understanding of the limitations of mentalistic or memetic thinking thus must derive from an understanding of the limitations and possibilities of the methods that guide and frame our questions.

Mentalism, Memetics, and Method

The best way to find out how your mind works is to map your overt (walking, talking) and covert (perceptions, emotions) behavior to actual neural processes, or failing in that to discover indirect ways that can give you some general knowledge of those same neural processes. A second approach is to hypothesize intervening mental forces or faculties that create or modulate behavior. These faculties may act as placeholders or ciphers until the true intervening processes are discovered, but more often than not are treated as real rather than metaphorical events. Thus, ego strength, self-actualization, psychic energy etc. can become more than metaphors for processes we don’t know about or can scarcely describe, and become real entities. Moreover, the creation of inferred processes can become unrestrained if they are not validated by a reference to the empirical facts of behavior. For mentalistic or memetic thinking this is commonly the case. Mentalistic or memetic interactions are not claimed to map with any precision to the neuro-psychological (arousal, alertness) or covert (muscular tension, relaxation) processes that actually produce and influence overt behavior. Because they are not even loosely constrained by or tied to actual neural or somatic processes, the variables or variable weights of each metaphorical element in an argument may be changed to fit the problem. Hence if Johnny does not practice piano despite the threats of a parent or the prospect of a piano competition, then the explanation of his behavior is saved by the introduction of a laziness variable that provides a post hoc explanation of his behavior. Likewise, if Johnny is a fervent Christian, a memetic explanation would attribute his behavior to the ‘infectiousness’ or ‘fittedness’ of the set of ideas or memes that constitute his thoughts. This trend takes its most complex iteration in modern cognitive theories that attempt to map the computational basis of thought. The development of such ‘neural-net’ models is "constrained by the knowledge of the behavioral output of the organism and by logico-mathematical considerations, and not by direct information about the internal processes and structures mediating that output." "Internal events are merely inferred from their external behavioral effects…. which is akin to attempting to understand the internal workings of a computer by looking only at its outputs and inputs." Moreover, "inferred internal events that are solely the product of inferences from behavior invite circular reasoning. That is, behavioral observations provide the basis for the inferences, but then the validity of the inferences is judged by their consistency with the behavior that led to the inferences in the first place." (Donahoe, 1997)

In addition to the pitfall of relying on inferred processes that are not grounded to neural or behavioral events, the determination of generalized sets of causes and effects is commonly held as an adequate substitute for rather than a complement to the isolation of specific agents of cause and effect. Although mentalistic and memetic interactions are not mapped to the actual processes that instantiate behavior, a common perception held by layman and academic alike is that the averaged behavior of groups of people provides for a more adequately controlled and more generalizable substitute for individual data that map to actual processes. In this way, at least the general determinants of behavior may be isolated, even though those determinants are largely inferred. Indeed, the larger the population sample, the more reliable the prediction. Thus, it would be a very reliable prediction to say that Americans would weather an economic downturn because of their emotional resilience and courage, or that a people may go communist because they have been infected with the ideas or memes of Marxism.

The comparison of averaged groups of responses of similar subjects under different conditions represents a ‘between group’ experimental design. Between group designs are predominantly employed by social and experimental psychologists to trace the behavioral significance of stimulus or environmental conditions that cannot be easily traced through their influence on individual subjects. For example, crime rates may be correlated between separate groups of people who differ because of race, gender, age, socio-economic status etc., or with groups that embody different combinations of traits. The cross correlation or ‘factor-analysis’ of sets of variables between groups of subjects often includes as measurable variables the inferred mind states of individuals. Thus reports of self-esteem, personal control, or emotional well being (e.g. stress, ‘flow’) are often cross-correlated with work and leisure conditions, family and social structure, etc. As compared to within group designs that trace causes and effects among individual subjects, between group designs aggregate the behavior of groups of individuals, and ultimately blur the distinction between cause and effect (Sidman, 1960). Moreover, with the unrestrained employment of inferred processes as the dependent or independent measures in such designs, the distinction between cause and effect may be even further confounded. Thus, between group designs can only at discover general truths at best, obscure the truth at worst, and cannot derive the specific truths that may only come from the analysis of individual behavior.

In the physical and biological sciences, between group studies generally complement and inform ‘within group’ experiments that isolate the causes and effects of individual variables in individual subjects. Thus the finding that populations of individuals that exercise live longer than populations that do not informs research in fields such as exercise physiology, cardiology, endocrinology, etc. that trace how exercise modifies the human body. However, in the social sciences, this is generally not the case. Whether the causes of the behavior of individual groups are discussed and compared as conceptual objects (e.g. intrinsic motivation, self esteem, etc.) or are formally contrasted through statistical means, rarely if ever are these findings used to inform research that traces individual behavioral or neural processes across time. Indeed, an historical antipathy has existed between advocates of these respective historical designs. This has resulted in an unproductive tendency among those camps that champion within group (behaviorism) and between group (social and experimental psychology) designs to ignore the experimental literature of each other (Krantz, 1971).

The general acceptance of the notion that behavior is caused by discrete and disembodied conceptual objects has been accompanied by near exclusive reliance on experimental methodologies that can only confirm that notion. The copious journalistic literature of psychology reveals an endless train of articles that reshuffle inferred causal variables in statistical or logical matrices of ever evolving complexity, but without ever questioning the mentalistic philosophy that is at their root. And so the question remains, is that philosophy correct from the standpoint of how the human mind actually works? The short answer is no.

Biobehaviorism

Ultimately, a true science of behavior is no more capable of perfectly predicting behavior any more than the science of biology can tell us when we may catch the flu. But prediction is not the point. Rather, a science of behavior provides explanations, simple and uniform metaphorical schemes that we use to understand our world. And it is from this basic metaphorical language that simple procedures may be developed that can allow for greater self control and provide general insight and guidance into how we construct and choose our values. However, even in its latest incarnation as evolutionary psychology, motivational psychology still relies on root explanations for behavior that are scarcely removed from the mentalistic mechanisms that informed both common and wise men since civilization began. However, if these root explanations are demonstrated to be false, then all that we know of psychology must be reinterpreted from an entirely new perspective.

In psychology, the sheer complexity and obtuseness of the human mind has always been used to justify the predominant use of between group methodologies and the postulation of inferred mental processes. Within group designs were simply not capable of describing how information is actually processed in the brain, or of providing simple metaphorical explanations for the interaction of mind and behavior. Thus, whereas the disease model in biology was a simple explanatory model that derived from the complex processes of contagion, no similar models were available in psychology because brain processes remained ill understood.

There were of course attempts to provide such models despite these limitations. In order to avoid the muddled and labyrinthine thinking that mentalism entailed, behaviorism, and in particular the operant conditioning movement meticulously documented how overt or operant behavior could be mapped in time to changing patterns of reward. However, the limitations of behaviorism became quickly apparent when it could not account for all of the behavior it purported to explain. Behavior was much more than responses to simple schedules or contingencies of reinforcement, and so behaviorism was roundly dismissed, forgotten, and frequently labeled as dead or dying (Pinker, 1997, Casti, 1989). The claims of behaviorism were discounted and thrown out, but out with the bathwater came also the baby, namely its experimental methodology. Ironically, within group methodology has never been discredited. Rather, it has been merely limited by the capability and precision of the procedures and tools that could map neural processes to environmental information derived from the senses, and the resulting inability to lead to an accessible metaphorical language that could account for those processes.

In recent years, new and better procedures and tools have been developed that have allowed psychologists to map neural processes with unparalleled precision. This has permitted psychologists for the first time to map ‘molecular’ neural processes to the large scale or ‘molar’ behavior that changes with environmental contingencies. This has enabled a new breed of behaviorists to expand what is called ‘behavior’ to include the entire organism’s behavior, from its neural underpinnings to the overt and covert behavior that such neural events manifest. This new form of behaviorism, also called theoretical (Staddon, 1998) or bio-behaviorism (Donahoe, 1993), has developed a conceptual framework that provides an accessible metaphorical model of the human mind that is implicitly grounded to real neural events. Like genetic and disease models, this metaphorical model is molecular because it can map to the moment to moment changes in overt and covert behavior that represent in aggregate an ‘experience’. For example, a ride on a roller coaster can be described as a thrilling experience. But a ‘thrilling experience’ represents but a class of covert (activating events such as emotion and alertness) and overt (holding on to the rail bars, waving ones hands) that vary with each twist and turn of the ride. Indeed, a roller coaster designer would not be interested in whether the ride as a whole was enjoyable or not, but rather in the small scale or molecular facets of the experience that were elicited by moment to moment changes in the position, incline, and velocity of the coaster. By knowing the fine grain elements that accentuate the positive experience of a roller coaster ride, the designer would be able to maximize them in future designs. Similarly, an understanding of the fine grain or molecular events that maximize the attractiveness or reinforcing nature of behavior permits a psychologist to understand how behavior is shaped, why it persists, and what small changes may be implemented that may alter behavior.

However, by focusing on incremental perceptual changes within small time scales and the brief neural events that underlie those changes, this molecular focus entails a radical shift in how behavior is conceptualized. The molecular perceptual events that change behavior are guided by equally small-scale somatic and neural events that mark the importance or salience of moment to moment changes in behavior. Changes in environment-behavior relationships that mark moment to moment shifts in attention are defined as reinforcement, which on a neural level "causes the neurotransmitter dopamine to be liberated in synaptic clefts between coactive and post synaptic neurons" (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993). Dopamine ‘fixes’ attention, makes thinking more efficient, and also and mediates feelings of elation and pleasure (Ashby, Isen, and Turken, 1999). Dopamine production is scaled to the salience of individual perceptual events (Montague et al. 1994), and can be sustained if attention must continually shift between a cascade of salient events. This fact is indirectly confirmed by the frequent self-reports of feelings of ecstasy and pleasure in situations that require an individual to shift attention between multiple salient precepts. Creative or otherwise demanding behavior (e.g. climbing mountains, performing surgery, etc.) are commonly associated with such ecstatic of flow response (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).

Molecular shifts in attention are also modulated by somatic activation variables that can occur within these short time frames, and are products of prior learning. These ‘somatic markers’ form the basis of emotion (Damasio, 1994), and represent pleasurable or painful somatic states (muscle relaxation, tension) that mark the salience of individual response options, and enable one to decide more effectively between those options. Somatic markers provide the ‘gut feelings’ which allow an individual to make effective decisions prior to a conscious contemplation of all alternatives. Providing a function similar to dopaminergic reinforcement processes, somatic markers "also provide a booster for continued working memory and attention", and influence nearly all behavior (Damasio, 1994).

If reinforcement is defined as molecular shifts in attention that are mediated by neural and somatic activation variables, the salience of individual perceptions must still be guided by elemental characteristics of the environment that have value. These elements are not arbitrary, but are entirely dependent upon the genetic endowment of the individual. Thus, an individual is ‘prepared’ to attend to precepts that increase personal control over food, mates and the discriminative events (money, prestige, property, etc.) that lead to that control.). However, the level and duration of neural and somatic activation or arousal is not constant across choices, and varies with changes in the salience of events, the contingency between events, and the correlation between events. For example, an individual becomes more aroused when very hungry because food is more salient, or if his safety becomes at risk. Similarly, one’s arousal may be sustained due to behavioral contingencies that demand a continuous change in perceptual set. Thus a gambler, mountain climber, or artist may become continuously aroused due to a need to continuously shift attention to different cognitive precepts. Finally an individual may become aroused by events that have a mere historical correlation of salient event with neutral events. That is, the mere association of activation variables with other concurrent environmental events adds value to these events, even though those events are not the proximal cause of those variables. For example, an individual who experiences a painful emotion trauma (e.g. a car wreck) or a blissful flow experience (e.g. climbing a mountain) will attribute his pain or pleasure to heretofore ‘neutral’ elements of the environment that framed those emotions. Thus the car wreck victim will avoid the scene of the accident or perhaps even the town in which it occurred, and the poet will attribute his ecstasy to the act of mountain climbing itself.

Although behavior is selected by an instinctive consideration of abstract elements of a situation that bestow evolutionary value, this value is continually biased or skewed by the modulation of the very activating processes that enable and enhance the ability to choose. Because value is determined by nativistic sensitivities and activating (attentive arousal, emotion) neural and somatic events that change on a moment to moment basis, reinforcement becomes a continuous and not a discrete event, and therefore cannot be homeostatic or disembodied. Since reinforcement is determined by the aspects of moment to moment somatic and neural stimulation, it is inherently heterostatic and embodied. In other words, reinforcement is not disassociated from affect, it is affect. Secondly, metaphorical models of molecular reinforcement processes bestow greater predictive power than molar models of reinforcement that engage metaphorical ‘faculties’ such as will power, courage, etc., and permit a more parsimonious and comprehensive account of the facts of behavior. Third, the identification of reinforcement with changes in perceptual set that may represent actual or virtual (as-if) environmental changes is contrary to well established economic and popular opinion that identifies value with the possession of individual objects. Thus popular conceptions of materialism are wrong.

The Selfless Gene

Ultimately, the problem with mentalistic or memetic explanations for behavior is that they are misconstrued to be accurate and precise models of behavior, when they are merely heuristic models that generally summarize cause and effect. We do not question these explanations because they generally serve us well in our day to day lives, where speed rather than accuracy in thinking is important. However, the ability to switch to more accurate modes of thinking is still critical when prediction is important. A baseball player for example can summarize the activity of throwing a ball by saying he threw the ball hard, but immediately switch to more precise explanations that involve throwing angle, stance, and grip. Similarly, we can switch from mentalistic and memetic accounts of behavior that engage mental faculties (will power, courage, contagious ideas, etc.) to explanations that involve the individual causal events that are the product of learning and present experience.

Throughout the history of philosophy and psychology, the limited predictive power of molar explanations has always been ‘enhanced’ by the addition of ad hoc inferred processes that in hindsight provide perfect post hoc predictions, but add little or nothing to their predictive power. The fact that molar reinforcement principles have limited predictive power underscores the fact that the values they engender (e.g. materialism) can only erratically sustain personal satisfaction or happiness. Moreover, since molar reinforcers are not ubiquitous, and generally have to be rationed, many philosophers spend entire careers examining and justifying how they are to be divided up. Thus ‘having it all’ also means someone else cannot have it all, with accompanying problems of moral justification that justify the existence of theologians, philosophers, politicians, and of course psychologists.

In contrast, molecular reinforcement principles do not have this difficulty. Because molecular reinforcement derives from as-if relationships that are modeled virtually, and need effect no imminent or even future change in the material world, reinforcement becomes not a scarce commodity, but a potentially unlimited one. If happiness is equated with the maximization of the reinforcing events we encounter daily, then an identification of reinforcement with heterostatic events can not only create worlds of limitless value, but sharply enhance an inclination towards behaviors that reflect a moral temperament.

Human beings are all instinctively drawn to actions that maximize their self-interest, or in an evolutionary sense, their genetic fittedness. However, the fact that the human brain was engineered to pursue heterostatic rather than homeostatic ends defines value not in a search for things, but rather in the stimulating implications of those things as mediated by their informative context. Furthermore, since stimulation itself biases behavior, and directs it away from aims that strictly maximize genetic fittedness, fittedness alone cannot reflect the single standard by which behavior must be judged. These standards contrast with those objective values that logically serve our self-interest, and result in behavior that is frequently called ‘self-less’. Hence an individual who is able to model the behaviors of other people will be emotionally reinforced by an estimate of how they will positively respond to his actions, but will also be emotionally restrained if that estimate is less salutary. Furthermore, he will compromise the choices that maximize his real interest to those that maximize his virtual interest. Thus, an individual can give up his life for God and country, be faithful to his wife, and neither cheat nor steal, and give up his real interests for rewards that reflect only conceptual value.

The fact that value is virtual, and involves abstract changes in environmental relationships creates new criteria for social values, and ultimately for the design of cultures. Heterostatic value favors more complex conceptual objects, since complexity forces rapid perceptual set changes that mediate neural arousal and feelings of pleasure. Heterostatic value also favors empathy, since empathy allows the continuous modeling of complex objects. Finally, heterostatic value favors ease in communications, since effective communication reduces the cost for information transfer. In other words, maximally reinforcing environments are comprised of complex conceptual objects that we can model in our minds and share easily with others.

So what would this brave new world look like? Ironically, it is precisely the same world we idealize through our cultural traditions. In spite of an onslaught of materialistic values that reduce value to collections of physical objects that merely maximize our physical survivability, we long for worlds that entice, enhance, and enable our imaginations. These worlds take form in the idealized cultures of Ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and Renaissance Italy. Intelligent and urbane populations who have broad, intricate and competitive interests, share information widely and easily (after all, Athens, London, and Florence were small cities or city states, and in an internet-less world, were perfectly fashioned for ‘sneaker-net’ communications) and know each other’s minds. Historical tradition assigns the genius of cultures to accidents of geography, economic competition, military threat, or perhaps some innate racial characteristic. Yet when genius is considered, the supporting environment is often forgotten or disparaged, as if Plato, Shakespeare and Michelangelo rose above their times when they were merely products of their times. The creativity of scientists, saints, and sages is sustained by a multiple set of challenges that are mediated by culture to beget universal interest that may frequently end in the highly creative accomplishment marked by a few. In other words, when cultures provide the mechanisms to maximize stimulation through the multi-faceted and universally applied reinforcement of the effort to create, and when entire populations aspire to genius, individual genius inevitably follows.

Evolutionary Humanism

The defining principles of humanism, a belief in the primacy of man’s creation, and empathy for its creators, have traditionally been defined as super-ordinate, or imposed from above. Human virtue and creativity did not emerge from simpler, more primitive processes, but rather were sparked by extra-biological or vitalistic forces such as consciousness, free will, or the grace of God. Ultimately however, an appeal to vitalistic causes begs or obscures the question of causation. Yet, vitalistic reasons for behavior remain enduringly attractive because they provide simple reasons and a needed justification for general tendencies of behavior that we implicitly feel are necessary and true. Hence, if we cannot justify human virtue through reason, an appeal to extra-human causes is enough to justify our love of our fellow man. However, if complex forms of behavior can derive from simple biological principles, can human virtue be far behind? Does human goodness ultimately flow from reasoning based in knowledge of the simplest things?

Arguably, the principles first espoused by Charles Darwin arguably provide us with the deepest and most general insights into how we may understand complex phenomena (Donahoe, 1997). Darwin’s two major conceptual contributions were that structure and function were inter-linked, and that structure or morphology was the cumulative effect of natural selection. His second major contribution was that complex structure/function arose as the emergent product of lower level processes acting over time. No appeal to higher level principles was required to understand the origins of complex structure and function. "Instead, complexity emerged as a byproduct of fundamental biological processes whose effects were largely captured by the principle of natural selection" (Donahoe, 1997).

However, these general principles were not fully accepted until the molecular processes behind genetics and the flow of genes across generations was fully understood. The resulting synthetic theory of evolution provided broader principles of selection thus could span from molar and molecular principles, and could explain how man evolved and how cells mutate. Likewise, to be persuasive, selectionistic principles in psychology must also derive from an understanding of the molecular processes that produce learning. Presently, evolutionary psychology is not totally persuasive since it still lacks an accounting of the actual neural processes that underlie choice. This has helped perpetuate arguments revolving about contentions whether this behavior or that behavior is the result of nature, nurture, or some tangled combination of both.

The application of large scale or molar evolutionary principles to the molecular processes that determine individual choice is based on the erroneous idea that these higher level principles may adequately describe lower level cognitive processes. There was thus no need to understand molecular processes since those processes were generally isomorphic to higher level processes. That is, the symbol manipulation in common language is in some way equivalent to smaller scale but equally algorithmic computational processes in the brain.

The assumption that nativistic or inborn sensitivities are the basis of value precludes ‘humanistic’ considerations of moral sentiment and religious value. Indeed, these considerations could only be viewed as a cultural artifact that do not directly emerge from selectionistic principles, but were a societal imposition that masked our true genetic impulses. However, this position is only half right, since the brain was designed to crave means, not just ends. Decision-making is enabled by heterostatic and embodied mechanisms that add value to the modeled implications of behavior. It thus provides a neurological explanation and justification for empathy. Therefore, the moral rules that derive from empathy are not imposed, and they need not even be articulated in common law or religious commandments. Rather, morality simply emerges from basic processes of socialization, and is progressively heightened as we begin to know more of our worlds, and the mental worlds of other people. Socialization, or the totality of education and experience that gains us the ability to experience and model the world, enfolds and embraces our reinforcers and our morals. The humanistic values that exalt cultural complexity and moral virtue are a natural byproduct of the rudimentary neural processes that in concert make us human. In the best sense, to be understand and accept evolutionary principles is to recognize that humanistic values are the culmination of evolution.

References

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