liking and wanting in the brain Flashcards
Describe “hedonia” and “eudaimonia” as discussed in this chapter. According to this chapter, what relationship do they tend to have with one another, empirically speaking?
-Hedonia speaks to the experience of pleasure
-eudaimonia speaks to the amount of meaning or purpose one feels they possess in their life and together they constitute the two aspects of happiness that most modern affective neuropsychologists believe play a role in the overall happiness of an individual.
Hedonia is easier to measure scientifically, so it is believed that by studying the pleasure-driven side of happiness, it will help to identify brain markers that distinguish happy people, which would theoretically include some brain markers that will turn out to overlap with eudaimonic happiness.
In this chapter, the authors claim that higher level (e.g., social) and lower level (e.g., physiological) pleasures “share common neural currency.” What do they mean by this?
Evidence from neuroimaging studies suggest a single shared core process of positive affect shared by many diverse pleasurable experiences, even though those experiences subjectively feel different and unique. These pleasurable experiences (higher level and lower level) activate the same brain structures, and it is this strong degree of neural overall in hedonic circuitry that gives rise to the hypothesis of a shared underlying neural currency for generating pleasure regardless of how unique the source of pleasure may be experienced subjectively. Even though a higher level pleasure and lower level pleasure may feel subjectively different, it is thought that other brain structures mediating the pleasurable experience are responsible for these differences, but the core experience of pleasure is anatomically identical.
