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“Don’t be emotional.”
“Think logically.”
“Emotion clouds judgment.” Somewhere along the way, emotions were framed as the enemy of reason—unpredictable, messy, and irrational. Psychology, however, tells a far more nuanced and fascinating story. Emotions are not irrational. They are informational. From an evolutionary perspective, emotions exist because they work. Fear alerts us to danger. Anger signals boundary violation. Sadness slows us down for reflection and recovery. Joy reinforces behaviours worth repeating. These responses are not random reactions—they are adaptive signals shaped by survival needs. Neuroscience supports this view strongly. Emotions arise from coordinated activity between multiple brain regions, including the amygdala, insula, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. The amygdala does not “override” logic; it tags information with significance. It answers a crucial question: Does this matter right now? Without that tag, decision-making collapses. Research on patients with damage to emotional processing regions shows something striking: they can reason logically, list pros and cons, and analyse options—yet they struggle to make even simple decisions. Why? Because without emotional input, choices carry no weight. Everything feels equally important—or equally irrelevant. In psychology, this is known as affective guidance. Emotions guide attention, prioritisation, and memory. They help the brain decide where to focus and what to store. This is why emotionally meaningful events are remembered more vividly and retrieved more easily. Emotion doesn’t disrupt cognition—it organises it. So where does the idea of “irrational emotions” come from? It usually emerges when emotions are misinterpreted, not when they are experienced. Emotions respond to perceived reality, not objective reality. If the perception is distorted, the emotional response may appear disproportionate. But the emotion itself is still doing its job—responding to what the brain believes is true. This distinction is crucial for students. In exams, emotions like anxiety are often labelled as weaknesses. But moderate anxiety actually enhances alertness and focus. Problems arise only when emotional arousal exceeds the brain’s regulatory capacity. This is not emotion versus logic—it’s regulation versus overload. IB Psychology increasingly rewards students who understand this interaction. Strong answers recognise that emotion and cognition are intertwined, influencing memory, decision-making, and behaviour together. Simplistic claims like “emotion interferes with rational thinking” miss the discipline’s core insight. Emotion is not the opposite of thinking. It is part of thinking. When students learn to regulate emotions rather than suppress them, performance improves. Calm does not come from eliminating emotion—it comes from understanding and managing it. Psychology doesn’t ask us to choose between feeling and thinking. It teaches us that the brain evolved to do both—together.
References:Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain.
LeDoux, J. (2000). Emotion circuits in the brain.k.
Damasio showed that emotions act as signals that help the brain evaluate options, predict consequences, and make efficient decisions—especially under uncertainty. Patients with damage to emotional processing areas (like the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) could reason logically, yet made poor real-life decisions because they lacked emotional input. This proved that emotions are not opposed to reason; they are integral to it. Without emotions, rational thinking becomes slow, ineffective, and detached from real-world consequences.
The Somatic Marker Hypothesis is directly relevant to IB exam performance because exams are high-stakes situations where decisions must be made quickly, under pressure, and with incomplete certainty—exactly the conditions Damasio studied.
For IB students, somatic markers are built during practice. When a student has repeatedly planned answers, timed themselves, and evaluated responses, the brain links certain feelings with effective strategies: a sense of readiness when structuring an ERQ, or mild discomfort when an answer is drifting off-topic. In the exam hall, these bodily signals quietly guide decisions—which question to attempt, when to move on, how to structure an argument—without conscious effort.
Students who lack this practice have weak or misleading somatic markers. Anxiety feels like danger rather than a cue to focus, leading to panic, overthinking, or blanking out. In contrast, well-prepared IB students interpret exam arousal as familiar and manageable, allowing emotional signals to support rather than disrupt reasoning. In short, IB exams reward students who have trained their emotions through experience—because emotions, when calibrated, make thinking faster, not worse. As Antonio Damasio explains, “We are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling machines that think,” and this insight fits IB exams perfectly. In an exam, emotion is not a distraction—it is a decision-making tool. As Damasio argues, “Emotion is not a luxury; it is a means of decision-making,” helping students choose questions, manage time, and sense when an answer is drifting off-track. When emotions are absent or suppressed, thinking becomes inefficient; “Without emotion, decision-making becomes flawed.” IB assessments reward students who have trained their emotional responses through practice, so that mild anxiety becomes a guide rather than a threat—turning emotion into navigation under pressure, not noise.
Emotions are not irrational because they play a functional, decision-guiding role in human thinking. This was powerfully demonstrated by Antonio Damasio through his Somatic Marker Hypothesis.
The Somatic Marker Hypothesis, proposed by Antonio Damasio, explains how emotions guide decision-making through bodily signals. A somatic marker is a physical feeling—such as a gut tightness, warmth, or unease—that becomes linked to past experiences and their outcomes. When we face a similar situation again, the brain rapidly reactivates these bodily signals, helping us mark options as good or bad without needing slow, deliberate analysis. In simple terms, somatic markers act like emotional bookmarks: they bias attention, narrow choices, and speed up decisions—especially under uncertainty. Damasio showed that people who lose access to these emotional signals can reason logically yet make poor real-life choices, proving that emotions are not irrational noise but essential inputs to rational thought.
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