If you never say your name out loud to anyone, they can never call you by it

The other day I volunteered to be a willing victim in a grad student-run psychology experiment which, I think, was geared toward measuring how mood affects learning. Besides having to do a beyond frustrating hand/eye reaction time exercise that convinced me that if competency was judged on that skill I'd end up on the short bus, there was a quizilla.com-type questionnaire section which used cleverly subtle directives like "pick the word that appeals to you more: A) Emotion B)Logic" to determine whether I tend to make judgments with my "head" or my "heart."

Answering that type of question makes me wish I had neither. For one thing, I whole heartedly (and, I guess, whole headedly) believe that it's impossible to separate logic and emotion when making sound decisions. It's impossible to think without being affected by emotions and to feel without thinking about them. Illustratively, and according to my theory, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man should have been a single freakish TincrowScareman that, if set on fire, would probably have made a pretty satisfactory oven.

That aside, I also always wind up feeling a little uncomfortable when forced to choose between the two in a survey format. The answers that lean on the side of logic always throw in a bunch of questions that imply that the brain-oriented individuals are all the types of people who spend their time programming their calculators to humiliate the average high schooler at a game of chess. While when it comes to decision-making, I usually pick truth and rationality over pity and intuition, I'd also rather have a conversation than order numbers in sequential pairs. Judging from how these tests are written, test writers would be surprised to know that logic-oriented people manage to have friends and function in civilized society. Conversely, the emotionally-driven are implied to have never made a correct decision in their lives thanks to blind, raging hormones. The limited dual categories strike me as a misrepresentation of me and probably most other functionally living people prone to participate in psychology experiments.

I fully appreciate the need for generalizations and categorization, but I feel like valid general labels should at least apply to a significant portion, if not a majority, of the population, not a miniscule and probably seriously unbalanced minority.

You could argue that human logic is based on emotion and compassion anyway, in which case the distinction isn't even possible, let alone relevant.

Before I did the experiment, I signed a little piece of paper that told me that I could stop and leave at any time for any reason. At the time I wondered under what circumstances would someone be so offended by remembering letter combinations that they'd take advantage of that liberty, but in retrospect, it would have been kind of funny to huffily refuse to continue the survey because of a moral disagreement with the concept of differentiated logical/emotional decision-making. And when I say "funny," I mean "idiotic," but I guess the option was there.