Why Do Emotions Hijack Our Decisions? The Neuroscience of Impulsivity

Why do some people struggle to control their actions when emotions run high? What happens in the brain when impulsive decisions take over? Why do some brains lose control under high arousal, while others stay composed? 

In this episode of Under the Cortex, host Özge Gürcanlı Fischer-Baum speaks with Matthew V. Elliott from the University of California at Berkeley. Elliott’s study published in APS’s journal Clinical Psychological Science explores the science of emotion-related impulsivity—a trait linked to psychiatric disorders, aggression, and even suicidality. Fischer Baum and Elliott discuss how a new model of brain function, the GANE model, helps explain why heightened physiological arousal makes it harder for some people to regulate their emotions, what norepinephrine does to “hotspot” brain regions, and what this means for mental health treatments. 

Send us your thoughts and questions at  [email protected].

Unedited Transcript

[00:00:09.260] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

We’ve all made impulsive decisions in the heat of the moment, but for some people, emotional impulsivity is a persistent struggle. Why do some brains lose control under high arousal while others stay composed? This is Under the Cortex. I’m Özge Gürcanlı Fischer-Baum with the Association for Psychological Science. Joining me is Matthew V. Elliott from the University of California at Berkeley, who has a recent article on this topic in APS’s journal Clinical Psychological Science. Together, we will dive into the neuroscience of self-control and discuss whether impulsivity can be predicted through brain scans. Matt, thank you for joining me today! Welcome to Under the Cortex!  

[00:00:52.410] – Matthew V. Elliot 

Thanks so much for having me. I’m happy to be here. 

[00:00:55.730] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Let’s start with our first question that we ask to everyone. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? What type of psychologist are you? 

[00:01:05.400] – Matthew V. Elliot 

Sure. I’m a clinical psychologist, and I’m actually just in the last few months of my PhD. I’m training to be a clinician, and also a clinical scientist, and I love using and learning about cognitive neuroscience methods to inform how we can understand better brain behavior relationships that are relevant to folks struggling with their mental health. 

[00:01:29.880] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

First, congratulations. That is great news. And your research definitely feels a gap in the field. So that brings me to my next question. What inspired you to study impulsivity in general? 

[00:01:44.130] – Matthew V. Elliot 

I think I’ve always been interested in emotion and just interested in the ways that mood can shift throughout someone’s life, how emotions motivate us, and also how there’s really a delicate balance between emotion-driven behaviors and between constrained or regulated behaviors. This is really a tight rope that we walk. As you said earlier, we all have moments when we lose our sense of self-control. But for some people, this becomes quite disruptive and a repetitive and chronic pattern. I’ve just been interested in trying to understand a little bit more about what makes folks vulnerable for that and if there’s something that we can understand under the cortex, I guess, to help inform treatments. 

[00:02:38.750] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

I am looking forward to learning from your research as a mother of a preteen, definitely, emotions are everywhere right now, and we see different reactions coming so quickly. Let’s talk about it more. Could you explain what emotion-related impulsivity is, and how does it differ from other forms of impulsivity? 

[00:03:02.810] – Matthew V. Elliot 

Emotion-related impulsivity is really this chronic and trait-like pattern of losses of self-control under states of or context of high stress or high emotion. There are other forms of impulsivity that have been identified that are separable from emotion-related impulsivity. These might be things like having trouble maintaining one’s attention, just generally speaking, lack of planfulness or lack of perseverance. This actually traces back to around 2001, Whiteside and Lynam published the UPPS-P scale, which really started to break down these different separable forms or dimensions of impulsivity. Emotion-related impulsivity is really about these losses of self-constraint. That appear specifically in those context of high emotion or high physiological arousal more generally. 

[00:04:08.120] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

I’m not very familiar with this field. Given the date that you gave, can we say that This is a research that is mostly done in the last two decades? 

[00:04:21.640] – Matthew V. Elliot 

I think the concept of emotion-related impulsivity or urgency is another term that’s used. The urgency scale is the most popular self-report measure that’s used to measure this. I think the origin of that really can be traced in some ways back to the last couple of decades. But psychologists have, I think always been very interested in emotions, in self-control. I think that there is a much richer and deeper history that probably traces back all the way to the conception of psychology a century or more ago. 

[00:05:04.030] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah. Let’s talk about what it means for emotion-related impulsivity to be connected to different psychiatric disorders. Why is it such a strong predictor of mental health outcomes? 

[00:05:22.120] – Matthew V. Elliot 

I think there are a couple of paths or a couple of ways that emotion-related impulsivity confers risk for mental health outcomes. One is that when we’re challenged either through our emotions or through our mood more generally, and we struggle with constraint, that can in and of itself be quite distressing and really lead to a lot of problems and difficulties with functioning in our relationships, functioning in the things that matter most to us in our lives. I think that the definition of emotion Emulated impulsivity means that folks are having difficulty navigating skillfully in those high stress, high emotion moments. Then I think there’s also a bit of an aftermath effect. I think if we’re navigating these situations with some difficulty, or this is really having a knock-on effect to our relationships or our sense of belongingness. This can also pile on levels of maybe regret or guilt or embarrassment that might be adding additional layers of struggle or difficulty. I think that there are maybe a couple of different ways that emotion-related impulsivity is really challenging and predictive, as you said, for future mental health outcomes. 

[00:06:51.110] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, the point you make about what happens afterwards is really interesting, the regret, guilt. Yeah, what happens after we use control and the cyclical effect of that, maybe. Yeah, so we can go into that direction, but I would like to ask you questions about the GANE model. Sure. Because you have a novel approach. We’re studying emotion-related impulsivity. So your research connects emotion-related impulsivity to the glutamate amplifies noradrenergic effects GANE model. Can you explain what this model is and why is it important? 

[00:07:35.120] – Matthew V. Elliot 

Sure, it is quite a mouthful, and I’ll probably refer to it just as the GANE model. It is a really elegant model from more basic Neuroscience and Cognitive Neuroscience that was developed by Mara Mather and her colleagues at University of Southern California. It’s focused on explaining how our minds, our brains tune during During high stress moments. How do our brains, our minds, adapt so that we’re using our cognitive resources, our metabolic resources, as efficiently as possible in high stress and high emotions to address whatever that immediate need is based on the environment or the situation that we’re in. In the name, it mentions glutamate, it mentions neurogenic effects or noreponephrine, is another interchange It’s a manageable term for noradrenaline. It describes how these neurotransmitter systems play off of one another in order to allow for and to guide those resources to the brain systems that are going to be most high priority for the task at hand in that immediate moment. There’s this winner takes more, loser takes less phrase that’s often used, which It really just describes how the high priority or high salience representations or systems in our brain get upregulated through a positive feedback loop where high levels of glutamate signal high importance or high activity. 

[00:09:18.180] – Matthew V. Elliot 

When norepinephrine gets sent out diffusely throughout the brain from the locus aureus, that signals, Okay, we need to tune up the high priority, high glutamate regions, and we need to tune down through negative feedback mechanisms, the lower to moderate priority systems where there’s lower levels of glutamate. It’s this elegant way that our brain can really prioritize our cognitive resources in those high stress, high arousal moments. 

[00:09:53.080] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Matt, it sounds like this is the explanation for how norepinephrine shapes which brain regions are activated or suppressed under stress. Is that correct? 

[00:10:04.930] – Matthew V. Elliot 

Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:10:06.800] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

I would like to highlight something important about your research because your study suggests that high physiological arousal is something different from emotion. They both drive impulsivity in emotion-related impulsivity. Can you explain why this is a key insight? 

[00:10:29.360] – Matthew V. Elliot 

Sure, I think that initially in the study of emotion-related impulsivity, there was really a focus on specific emotions. You’ll see that in the urgency scales or some of the other measures that we use to identify people that are on the higher end of this emotion-related impulsivity spectrum. As more and more researchers have been trying to understand in the lab through experimental and neuroscientific or neuroimaging methods, there’s this trend in the literature to suggest that it might not be so much about specific emotions like anger or regret or sadness per se, but rather this broader state of high physiological arousal. For instance, as this field developed, there was a realization or a finding that it wasn’t just about negative emotions like you might expect, but also when people get really excited for folks that are experiencing some bipolar spectrum disorder, when there’s a hypomanic or a manic episode, that can also confer a high degree of emotion-evalued impulsivity. It seems like there’s not so much an emphasis or a necessity for a specific emotion, but more a broad spectrum high physiological arousal. I think this is important clinically because it gives us a sense of the broader range of contexts that might be relevant to try to intervene around. 

[00:12:15.210] – Matthew V. Elliot 

Also, when we’re trying to understand the neuroscience behind ERI, I think it gets us a little bit closer to, okay, what are some, like the GANE model, that might be relevant for tying together different findings in our literature. 

[00:12:31.490] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, this makes sense for me, especially as a mom, because we know that children also act out when they get excited, not only when they are angry. Now, I have an explanation more of a gut view. I would like to go back to the neuroscience side of things a little bit, because one of the things that I learned from your study is that there is a specific region, the right right inferior frontal gyrus play an important role in impulse control. Why is it significant in your study? 

[00:13:09.110] – Matthew V. Elliot 

The right inferior frontal gyrus is just in the front part of our brains, a little bit towards the side on the lateral side. This is a brain region that actually has been shown in human neuroscience and in nonhuman primate research studies to be very important for the initiation of inhibition, so holding back our motor response. This has been shown in functional MRI studies. This has also been shown in lesion mapping studies where they look at brain damage and look for the region of overlap across different patients or different studies that when damaged, there’s a real difficulty or deficit with this inhibitory control. In some ways, it’s actually really follows previous literature that the right inferior fernal gyrus, and that region in particular, functioning differently, would confer a risk for emotion-related impulsivity or be related to higher emotion-related impulsivity. When we looked across all of the studies that have done functional MRI in this literature, in this emotion-related impulsivity literature, that was the region in our meta-analysis that popped out. On the one hand, that’s, I think, quite intuitive, quite cool to see. I think it’s also really interesting that only about, certainly less than a third, maybe less than a quarter of the studies reported correlations in that region in and of itself. 

[00:14:47.250] – Matthew V. Elliot 

There’s actually a much broader set of regions that correlate with emotion-related impulsivity in functional MRI. That really was the frustration for me in trying to understand, Okay, wait. Maybe it is right in for your frontal gyrus, but there’s all these other brain regions, too, that have correlated in different studies. How do we make sense of that? That’s really that curiosity velocity, I guess, maybe frustration, a little bit of my own emotion-related impulsivity, actually motivating me to try to find a model that could tie this all together. That’s what also led me to the game model. 

[00:15:30.480] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

It definitely provides an explanation of how all these different areas come together, and it definitely paves the way for more research. I would like to ask you a couple of questions about real-world settings. Now that we have your paper, do you think your findings could help predict who is at risk for impulsive behavior? 

[00:15:59.590] – Matthew V. Elliot 

I think this is a really interesting question. I think at a practical predictive level, I’m not sure. I think there’s still some more work to be done. I think functional MRI, other forms of brain imaging are still quite expensive and inaccessible on a person-by-person basis. I think that in the future, it would be likely that this type of work might be able to identify, I I think particularly usefully if we could have some biomarkers or have some imaging methods in younger kids, in adolescents, that would allow us to maybe spot some vulnerability or some biomarker that would allow us to maybe catch this a little bit earlier or design particular interventions that would be useful in the clinical setting. I think we’re not quite there yet, but I could see it being very useful in the hopefully near future. 

[00:17:10.890] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

I mean, this is a good starting point, right? Let’s talk about interventions a little more, Matt, now that you mentioned that. What potential interventions do you see to target emotion-related impulsivity effectively? Like, psychological, pharmological, maybe neurological? What are your thoughts for the future? 

[00:17:35.890] – Matthew V. Elliot 

I think there’s been a pretty big area of emphasis on trying to find transdiagnostic psychosocial interventions. Whether that’s psychotherapy or other forms of talk therapy interventions. I think that one area that’s been really fruitful so far is this idea of implementation intentions. So thinking through the circumstances, the settings where one might expect to be vulnerable, given what we know about one’s vulnerability to emotion-related impulsivity, and then to put in place some plans, some tools that would be useful for navigating that situation. So this might be there are some great skills from dialectical behavior therapy that was developed by Marsha Linehan. There’s the distress tolerance skills from that approach. Then I always really think that mindfulness, meditation types of techniques can be quite helpful at just giving folks a little bit of space, a little bit of time to catch things in the moment and maybe have a little bit more room to be able to either change the setting that in or select an option that’s going to work for them a little bit more successfully. I think that there are some skill-based or coping-skill-based interventions that are out there that can be really helpful for folks with higher emotion-related impulsivity. 

[00:19:18.110] – Matthew V. Elliot 

Then I think that there are also some interesting newer approaches to cognitive training. These are computerized, almost gamified brain training tools that are designed to really work out the brain systems that are important for self-control, in particular under conditions of increasing stress or increasing emotion. Now, I think that there are still a lot of challenges with these, and it’s still a little bit early in finding or developing these cognitive and computerized brain training tools. But I’m optimistic that with some more work, with some more personalization, that that might be another path forward. I think that there’s some that we already know, and I think there’s a lot coming down the pike that I’m optimistic about from a clinical perspective. 

[00:20:22.480] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, that’s great. Now, let me ask you, what are the biggest unanswered questions about emotion-related impulsivity in the brain? Now, there are things that we know, thanks to your study and your approach. What is missing right now? 

[00:20:40.730] – Matthew V. Elliot 

Well, I think in relation to this article, One fascination that I have is whether for folks with higher emotion-related impulsivity, if the hotspot winner takes more, loser takes less mechanism that I described a little bit earlier, whether that is working differently. Maybe it’s that for folks with higher motion-related impulsivity, that gain system is really turning the temperature up even more strongly. Maybe the tuning is actually stronger or different in some way. It could also be that the GANE model is working the same, but it’s just amplifying differently based on different input. Maybe there are just different brain systems that are just higher priority for folks with higher ERI. I think that it would be really fascinating to also know where those differences exist, how much of that is genetic or heritable, and how much of that is based on someone’s learning history. There’s research that for folks with trauma backgrounds or trauma histories, that can really shift how we respond to high emotion, high stress situations, and understandably so. I think it’s really important to keep in mind that a lot of this could be related to learning history, which is sad in some ways, and also, I think, potentially hopeful in other ways, because if it’s something that is a little bit more rooted in learning history, well, then maybe we can work to unlear or to relearn in service of handling or approaching these types of high stress situations in ways that serve people a little bit better. 

[00:22:43.540] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, definitely. Obviously, the contextual side of things are also important. Let me ask you then, so how could your research be applied to areas like addiction, self-harm, or aggression? 

[00:22:59.290] – Matthew V. Elliot 

I think it’s I think it’s very relevant for each of those areas. There’s a really strong, robust literature showing that emotion-related impulsivity is relevant. It does predict higher levels of self-harm, higher levels of aggression, more vulnerability to addiction. I think this research in particular might give us some insight not only into what are the brain systems that are really important for us to understand in impulsivity, but then how that can actually branch out and can fur risk in these more specific and targeted behavioral profiles that we see oftentimes in our clinical work. I think the hope is that this will really lay the groundwork for continuing to tighten up and get a better sense of which interventions are the best fit for any specific person that’s struggling with some level of emotion-related impulsivity. I think it also gets to a precision mental health or precision medicine perspective. 

[00:24:22.190] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Well, let’s assume that you had unlimited resources for your research. What would you choose as your next big study on this topic? 

[00:24:35.760] – Matthew V. Elliot 

Yeah, that’s an exciting question to be asked. I think I would be really fascinated to take this a step further, both in the experimental design. I think that there are some really well-crafted experiments from the folks that developed the GANE model that would, if applied in the fMRI in the scanner, that we might be able to even get a little bit more evidence that the GANE model is relevant and how it is. I think thinking about not just whether the GANE model is relevant for a motion-related bolus of view, but how and in what ways it is conferring risk or correlated with these behavioral outcomes. I think progress in the experimental design, I think using scanning techniques that get us a little bit closer to the actual neurotransmitters, like glutamate and norepinephrine. We can’t see those directly in the fMRI scan, but there are magnetic resonance spectroscopy types of methods and neuromelanin scans that could allow us to really look at these systems with a little bit more precision and specificity. That’s one step forward. Then I’m also really interested in looking at what might be some epigenetic types of factors that are at play. 

[00:26:06.510] – Matthew V. Elliot 

I think that that would really also get us closer to this sense of how much of emotion-related impulsivity is nature and how much of it is learning history or nurture, I guess, to use that common phrase. Those are a couple of directions that I’m excited about. 

[00:26:26.190] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah. Thank you for answering all my questions. In Am I missing anything? Is there anything else that you would like to share with our listeners? 

[00:26:35.490] – Matthew V. Elliot 

I just really appreciate the interest of anybody that’s listening in. I think emotion-related impulsivity is something that we all deal with to some degree in our lives. I think that hopefully there’s a piece here that’s interesting or relevant. Also, I guess one other thing is that there’s never been a better time to advocate for the value of psychological science. For For those of us that are interested, now there’s never been a better time to express that interest and stand up for it. I think that’s it. 

[00:27:10.360] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Well, Matt, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. I personally learned a lot. I hope our listeners will also enjoy this. 

[00:27:19.900] – Matthew V. Elliot 

Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. 

[00:27:24.050] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

This is Özge Gürcanlı Fischer-Baum, with APS and I’ve been speaking to Matthew V. Elliott from the University of California at Berkeley.  If you want to know more about this research, visit psychologicalscience.org. Would you like to reach us? Send us your thoughts and questions at  [email protected].