Antonio Damasio
Portuguese-American neurologist and neuroscientist known for the somatic marker hypothesis
Neurologist born in Lisbon who worked at the University of Iowa and then the University of Southern California. He proposed that bodily signals of emotion help guide decisions, in the somatic marker hypothesis.
Why this person matters
Damasio and his collaborators, including Hanna Damasio, linked emotion to decision-making through studies of people with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. His books brought this work to general readers and prompted many experiments, along with criticism.
Main contributions
Somatic marker hypothesis
The hypothesis proposes that emotion-based signals from the body feed into higher brain regions, especially the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, to guide decisions in complex situations. A critical review dates it to Damasio and colleagues in 1991.
Descartes' Error
His 1994 book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain argued that emotion and reason are linked. It has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Lesion method with Hanna Damasio
Hanna Damasio, a neuroscientist and frequent co-author, contributed structural neuroimaging and neuroanatomy work that was significant to the lesion method research at Iowa.
Context and limits
In 2006 Dunn, Dalgleish and Lawrence reviewed the evidence, which rests largely on the Iowa Gambling Task. They argued that its interpretation is weakened by the participants' ability to identify the reward schedule consciously, ambiguity in the skin conductance data and a shortage of causal evidence linking bodily feedback to performance. They concluded that other accounts can explain the data as well.
In your introductory course
Biological bases of behaviour.Damasio appears in chapters on the brain and on emotion and decision-making. Students meet the somatic marker hypothesis alongside the Iowa Gambling Task and its critics.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 3.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1974
He completed his doctorate at the University of Lisbon.
- 1975
He began at the University of Iowa as a visiting assistant professor.
- 1994
Descartes' Error was published.
- 1997
Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Damasio published Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy in Science.
- 2005
He became director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.
Sources
- USC Dornsife, Antonio DamasioUniversity. Institutional biography inspected.
- Dunn, Dalgleish and Lawrence, The somatic marker hypothesis: A critical evaluation (Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2006, manuscript)Original work. Abstract inspected.
- Wikipedia, Antonio DamasioReference work. Reference article inspected.