Weighting pain avoidance and reward seeking: a neuroeconomical approach to pain.

摘要

The most important choices that we have to make in life often entail both positive and negative consequences. As common wisdom suggests and as formalized in many economic theories, the best choice of action is the one that maximizes rewards and pleasure and minimizes losses and pain. However, the way that positive and negative outcomes are weighted against one another within our brains is only beginning to be unraveled by the emerging discipline of neuroeconomics. We believe that the findings yielded by this scientific enterprise will not only prove to be useful for the understanding of our decision-making processes, but will also shed light on the way the value of pain is represented in our brains and how it influences our behavior.