12. Cognition & Emotion Flashcards
What are the 2 major issues in cognition and emotion?
1) Effect of cognitive processes on emotional experience
2) Effect of emotion on cognition
What are the 2 approaches to view the structure of emotions?
1) Categorical approach
2) Dimensional approach
What does the categorical approach propose about the structure of emotions?
Argues that there are several distinct emotions (eg. happiness, anger, fear, disgust, sadness)
What are the 3 dimensions of the dimensional approach?
1) arousal-sleep
2) misery-pleasure
3) positive-negative affect
These dimensions all refer to a basic 2-dimensional face. Most emotions can be fitted within that two-dimensional space.
Most emotions can be incorporated into a hierarchical structure. What is the higher level and lower level?
Higher level: positive or negative affect
Lower level: specific emotions
What are 3 key differences between emotion and mood?
1) Emotions last for less time.
2) Emotions are more intense. Mood less intense, can fail to attract our attention.
3) Mood has no specific identifiable cause. Emotions are usually caused by a specific event.
What is the relationship between emotions and mood?
Emotions can create moods and moods can be turned into emotions. No sharp distinction between moods and emotions.
How does cognition influence emotion?
Cognitive processes influence WHEN we experience emotional states and WHAT emotional state we experience in any given situation.
What are the 2 types of cognitive processes that influences how we perceive a stimulus?
1) Low-level bottom-up processes
2) High-level top-down processes
Describe low-level bottom-up processes.
- Involves attention and perception
- Triggered by a stimulus
- Activates occipital, temporal and parietal lobes associated with visual perceptual processing.
- Strong activation of amygdala which is associated with several emotions, especially fear. Level of self-reported negative affect associated most strongly amygdala activity
Describe high-level top-down processes.
- Involves stored emotional knowledge.
- Thinking about the event.
- Activated dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex, areas associated with high-level cognitive processes.
- Anterior cingulate and amygdala also activated.
- Level of self-reported negative affect was associated most with activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in producing cognitive representations of stimulus meaning.
Which brain areas are involved in cognitive processing and affective processing respectively.
1) Prefrontal cortex
2) Amygdala
Does emotional experience depend on one specific brain area?
NOPE. Emotional experience depends on the activation of several brain areas organized into complex networks.
The amygdala plays a role in what sort of processing?
BOTH bottom-up and top-down processing.
What is appraisal? What kind of processing does it involve?
The evaluation that we make about situations relevant to our goals, concerns, and wellbeing. Typically involves top-down processing. Determines what emotion we experience in a situation.
What are the 2 types of appraisals?
1) Appraisals based on reasoning (controlled and conscious) – slower and more flexible
2) Appraisals based on memory activation (automatic, without conscious awareness)
Any given emotion can be produced by several combinations of appraisals. What can be said about the importance of each appraisal?
Each appraisal was not necessary nor sufficient to produce a single emotion.
(Eg. Anger – goal obstacle; other accountability; blaming others; unfairness control)
How does the appraisal approach help us understand individual differences in emotional experience?
Individuals high in neuroticism experience much more negative affect because they used more negative appraisal styles
What does appraisal theory propose about the relationship between appraisal and emotion states?
Appraisals causes emotional states
Appraisal -> Emotional states
In relation to what appraisal theory proposes, what do real findings suggest about the relationship between appraisal and emotional states?
Emotional states tend to determine appraisal
Emotional states -> Appraisal
Emotion judgments temporally precede appraisal judgment. BUT still possible that appraisal judgments are made very rapidly, but time consuming to make explicit appraisal judgments.
What are 2 limitations of appraisal approach?
1) Causality between appraisal and emotional experience is unclear.
2) Scenario-based approach to appraisal and emotions deemphasizes the social context in which most emotion is experienced. Emotional experience generally emerges out of active social interaction rather than passively understanding a scenario.
Even when you don’t consciously perceive a negative stimulus, it can still put you in a negative emotional state. What does this tell us about emotional processing?
Appraisal processes can be automatic and below the level of conscious awareness.
Describe one evidence to show that emotional processing can be below the level of conscious awareness.
Presented participants with images related to phobias, but these images were presented subliminally under the level of conscious awareness. The photos cannot be identified consciously. Found that pictures relevant to the individual’s phobia would produce a more negative mood state than those that were irrelevant.
What is affective blindsight?
Blindsight - Patients with damage to the primary visual cortex lack conscious visual perception in parts of the visual field. But they show some ability to respond appropriately to visual stimuli despite having no conscious awareness of them.
Affective blindsight - occurs when different emotional stimuli can be discriminated in the absence of conscious perception.
In people with affective blindsight, what happens in their brain areas when presented with emotional stimuli?
Show activation of amygdala, especially when presented with fearful faces.
Is affective blindsight found in healthy individuals?
Yup. When we use TMS to produce a brief disruption to occipital functioning, resulting in no conscious perceptual experience, participants were still reasonably good at detecting the emotional expression
What is emotional regulation?
A deliberate, effortful process that seeks to override people’s spontaneous emotional responses
Name 5 emotional regulation strategies we use to modify our emotional experience.
1) Cognitive reappraisal
2) Controlled breathing
3) Progressive muscle relaxation
4) Stress-induced eating
5) Distraction
How does the process model help us to understand emotional regulation strategies?
Process model allows us to categorize emotion-regulation strategies. Based on assumption that emotion-regulation strategies can be used at various points in time.
What are the 5 categories of emotional regulation strategies according to the process model?
1) Situation selection - avoid stressful situations
2) Situation modification - eg. ask a friend to accompany you
3) Attentional deployment - use attentional process such as choosing to focus on pleasant thoughts
4) Cognitive change - use cognitive reappraisal to evaluate current situation positively
5) Response modulation - modulate expression of feelings
How does attentional deployment help to reduce negative mood?
Via distraction or attending to something else
How does the limited capacity of the working memory system help in attentional deployment to reduce negative mood?
If most of WM capacity is used to attend to distracting stimuli, there is little capacity left to process negative information.
How did brain activity change when participants were asked to view negative images while working on a secondary task that takes up WM resources?
Greater activation in prefrontal cortex but less activation of amygdala. Thus the more demanding task produced more activation within the WM system, leading to a dampening of negative emotion at the physiological (ie. amygdala) and experiential (ie. self-report) levels.
How do we use attentional processes to reduce positive and negative emotional states? (Attentional counter-regulation)
We attend to emotionally positive information when in a negative emotional state and to negative information when in a positive emotional state.
What is cognitive reappraisal?
Involves reinterpreting the meaning of a stimulus to change one’s emotional response to it
What are 2 types of distraction strategies?
Can be behavioral or cognitive (eg. deliberately thinking about something else).
How effective is cognitive reappraisal and distraction in reducing negative affect?
Considerable impact on intensity and nature of emotional experience. They were on average the most effective strategies for reducing negative affect.
What are 2 types of reappraisal strategies? Briefly describe them.
1) reinterpretation - Involves changing the meaning of the context in which a stimulus is presented
2) distancing - Involves taking a detached, third-person perspective
In cognitive appraisal and distraction, the ______ and ______ are consistently activated.
prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate
The activation of the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex in cognitive appraisal and distraction shows that ________ is involved in emotional regulation.
executive processes that coordinate processing
Both cognitive reappraisal and distraction strategies reduced negative affect and amygdala activation. Which strategy was more effective in reducing negative affect?
Cognitive reappraisal
Greater increases activation within the medial prefrontal cortex and anterior temporal regions (associated with processing affective meaning)
Describe 3 methods researchers use to manipulate mood state.
1) Ask participants to recall and write about a personal event in which they experienced a given emotion
2) Ask participants to read a series of sentences designed to induce increasingly intense feelings of elation or depression
3) Presenting emotionally positive or negative music or movie clips
What does attentional narrowing argue about the relationship between mood and memory?
Argued that emotion produces arousal which enhances our memory for information central to our current goals but impairs it for peripheral or unimportant information.
Describe one piece of evidence in support of the attentional narrowing theory in explaining enhanced memory for relevant information when aroused. (hint: skydivers)
Skydivers learned words in anxiety inducing conditions (on a plane shortly before jumping) or on the ground. those in anxiety-inducing condition recognized more skydiving-relevant words than those in control condition. Thus, high arousal and anxiety led those about to skydive to increase their focus on relevant information.
Besides emotion, attentional narrowing also depends on ______.
motivation
Anxiety and disgust produce attentional narrowing because it involves high motivational intensity and negative affect. Sadness led to attentional broadening rather than narrowing.
What is mood-state-dependent-memory?
the finding that memory is better when the mood state at retrieval and learning are the same than when they are different.
When mood state was the same at learning and retrieval, performance at free recall is better than when mood state was different. But this doesn’t apply to cued recall. Why?
Argued that mood state exerts less influence when crucial information is explicitly presented. “Do-it-yourself” principle – memory is more likely to be mood-dependent when effortful processing at learning and/or retrieval is required.
What is mood congruity?
Emotionally toned information is learned and retrieved best when there is congruity between its affective value and the learner’s current mood state. (Eg. Easier to recall happy aspects of the event when in a positive mood at the time of recall.)
Why is there more evidence of mood congruity for positive affect than negative affect?
People in a negative mood will be more motivated to change their mood which reduces the accessibility of negative memories. So even if they are in a sad mood, it is still hard to access sad memories as they want to change their mood.
What happens to patients with Urbach-Wiethe disease?
amygdala and adjacent areas are destroyed
When comparing LTM for positive, negative, and neutral pictures in healthy controls and 10 U-W patients. U-W patients had greatest and least memory impairment for which type of pictures?
Greatest: positive pictures
Least: neutral
Consistent with prediction that amygdala is involved in memory for both positive and negative information
Individuals with the greatest amygdala activation during learning of emotional material have high levels of LTM for that material. What does this tell us about the role of the amygdala in memory?
Amygdala plays an important role in enhanced memory for emotional information because amygdala has connections to brain regions strongly involved in memory processes (eg. hippocampus, prefrontal cortex)
How does mood and personality influence decision making?
Effect of mood and personality type with risk aversion (risk-taking behavior)
Fear or anxiety is most consistently associated with _______ judgments about the future
pessimistic
The estimated probability of future terrorist attacks after 911 was higher in fearful participants than in sad or angry ones.
Anxiety is often associated with what kind of decision making? (2)
1) impaired decision making
2) less risky
Why is anxiety often associated with impaired decision making?
Many decision-making tasks involve use of the working memory system, especially the attention-like central executive component. Anxiety impairs the efficiency of the central executive when performing complex tasks.
What are 2 possible explanations why anxious individuals are more risk-averse?
1) Anxious individuals are pessimistic about the likelihood of negative future events.
2) Anxiety is often triggered by high uncertainty and low personal control over a situation. Anxious individuals try to minimize uncertainty by making “safe” decisions.
Individuals in a sad mood tend to more _______ in their judgments about the likelihood of negative future events.
pessimistic
When participants were asked to choose between high vs low risk jobs, participants in a sad mood were _____ likely to choose high risk option.
more
They attached more importance to pay. Sad individuals experience the environment as being relatively unrewarding and so they are especially motivated to obtain rewards
Sad/depressed individuals were ____ risk averse than anxious individuals, but _____ risk averse than healthy controls.
less
slightly more
Why is anger a pleasant experience despite being associated with negative affect?
it leads individuals to believe that they can control the situation and conquer those whom they dislike.
What is Schadenfreude?
Experiencing pleasure at the misfortune of disliked others
Why is anger associated with negative affect?
Events triggering anger are remembered as unpleasant, can lead to behavior causing negative affect (eg. aggression; violence)
Anger is associated with relatively ______ judgments about the likelihood of negative events
optimistic
Why is anger often associated with optimistic judgments about the likelihood of negative events?
Anger is associated with a sense of certainty about what has happened and with perceived control over the situation
Anger is associated with increased risk taking in which gender?
Males
How does anger impair our ability to think straight?
It leads to shallow processing based on heuristics rather than systematic/analytic reasoning.
When already in an angry mood, how does putting an additional cognitive load via a secondary task affect your decision?
no effect at all
cognitive load reduces our ability to use systematic/analytic reasoning. But if we are already using heuristic reasoning in the first place, adding a cognitive load has no impact on our decision making.
Does the level of anger affect our tendency to use heuristic or analytic processing?
Yes.
Low levels of anger are associated with analytical/systematic processing.
High levels of anger are associated with heuristic processing.
Individuals in a positive mood state generally perceive the likelihood of negative events happening to them as ______ compared to individuals in a sad or anxious/fearful mood state.
smaller
Positive mood often leads individuals to be _______ risk averse.
more
Why does a positive mood lead individuals to adopt a less risky approach to decision making?
Individuals in a positive mood state become increasingly risk-averse as the level of risk increases. Possibly because they are motivated to maintain their current happy feelings.
How do people with positive affect tend to process information?
Positive affect is associated with a tendency to process information in a more heuristic/shallow manner.
Are all types of positive affect associated with heuristic processing of information?
No, not all. Only “anticipatory enthusiasm, amusement, and attachment love” but not “awe, nurturant love”
Manipulating mood state vs manipulating emotionality of content of reasoning task. Which is more effective?
Manipulating mood state
Why do anxious individuals have impaired deductive reasoning abilities?
anxious individuals are easily distractible and devote some of their attention to task-irrelevant thoughts (eg. “I am performing poorly”, “I can’t do this task.”) This uses up some resources of the central executive component of the WM. Highly anxious individuals have fewer central executive resources available to do the deductive reasoning task.
Why is sadness/depression associated with impaired deductive reasoning abilities?
Depression is associated with rumination, which is in turn associated with impaired performance on various cognitive tasks. They were poorer at integrating information from the two premises. This integration requires much use of working memory.
In what situation are depressives deductive reasoning abilities better than non-depressives?
When the task was related to depression
Depressed individuals spend much of their time thinking about the causes of their depression, so they become expert at reasoning about depression.
When presented with syllogisms related to their social concerns and worries, anxious individuals show ___ belief bias than non anxious ones.
More
Anxious individuals took longer to produce the correct answer with syllogisms involving a conflict between validity and believability than when there was congruence.
In clinical anxiety, which types of biases are important?
1) interpretive bias
2) attentional bias
What is attentional bias?
selective allocation of attention to threat-related stimuli
Which 2 tasks are used to test for attentional bias?
1) Emotional stroop task
2) Dot-probe task
Briefly describe the emotional stroop task.
Similar to normal stroop task but words are anxiety related. Must name the colour of emotionally negative anxiety relevant words vs neutral words
Anxious individuals took longer to name colours with emotionally negative than neutral words
Briefly describe the dot-probe task.
Two words are presented simultaneously
On critical trials, one word is threat-related and the other is neutral. A dot then appears at the position of one of the words.
Allocation of attention is assessed by recording speed of detection of the dot.
Detection times are shorter in attended areas.
In the dot-probe task, how is attentional bias indicated?
Attentional bias is indicated by a consistent tendency for detection times to be shorter when the dot replaces the threat-related word rather than the neutral word.
How can we explain the attentional bias? (hint: threat-detection mechanism)
This mechanism is largely automatic and is activated by threat stimuli presented subliminally
How do we reduce attentional biases?
attentional training
Alter the dot-probe task so that the dot always appears in the location of the neutral word. Train them to attend to the neutral word, and avoid allocating attention to the threat word.
Attentional training trains which stage of threat processing? Early automatic processes or later controlled processes?
Controlled
What is the interpretive bias?
the tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli and events in a threat-related way. Anxious individuals tend to exhibit the interpretive bias.
Interpretive bias occurs at which stage of processing? Which evidence shows this?
Later stage of processing
Interpretive bias in high-anxious individuals was only observed 1250 ms after sentence presentation but not at 500 ms. Suggest that interpretive bias doesn’t occur rapidly and automatically but rather depends on subsequent controlled processes.
Socially anxious individuals showed interpretive bias at which stages?
Response generation and selection stages
There is an association between anxiety disorders and interpretive bias. How do we show causality?
Therapy that reduces interpretive bias should reduce anxiety. This evidence was found. Provides evidence for causation.
