Neural Foundations of Meaning and Threat

Neural Foundations of Meaning and Threat Every action that we take is grounded in an elaborate web of beliefs and goals. Take the simple act of opening a door. Such an act depends on our beliefs about what lies beyond the door, as well as what is available to us in our current location. At an even more basic level, our attempt to open the door is rooted in a belief that we understand how a door works, and are capable of using it. Furthermore, without the goal of pursuing something beyond the door, the act of opening the door would probably not take place. Of course, we are usually unaware of the precursors of our actions as we make them – we don " t contemplate our presuppositions about the operation of doors or the contents of what lie beyond them before we open them. Nevertheless, when these presuppositions are challenged, their existence and importance come quickly into relief. Imagine you open a door expecting a women " s bathroom and you run into a man on his way out. In this case, your observation has come into conflict with your belief, and you are forced to pause and reconsider your course of action; the incoherence between your beliefs, goals, and observations has rendered you unable to act effectively until the discrepancy is resolved. This coherence that has been disrupted – what we will refer to as " meaning " – is the basis for our effective interaction with the world. The meaning of " meaning, " in both everyday parlance and scientific discourse, has been a perennial topic of discussion. Whereas the word is often equated with the value or significance of life events, Dilthey proposed that meaning arises when we consider the connectedness between life events; " the individual moment has meaning through its connection with the whole, through the relation of past and future, of individual existence and humanity " (Dilthey, 1910/2002, p. 253). Along these lines, meaning has been defined as " mental representations of relationships between committed propositions " (Proulx & Heine, 2010, p. 8) and as " consonance among the temporally extended and contextually distributed elements of the self " (McGregor & Little, 1998, p. 496). This basic human need for " systems of relations " (Camus, 1955, p. 10) is widely recognized, but what is its function? The answer, we propose, is …