3:2 Emotion processing Flashcards
______ is a set of cognitive functions that select & prioritize information for further processing.
Attention.
This selection occurs due to limits in our cognitive capacities to process all information.
After attention is grabbed, which types of events or situations are most likely to be processed further (from an adaptive evolutionary perspective)?
Emotional stimuli
Objects, events or situations that signal potential danger or reward and can effect our survival.
This makes sense from an adaptive evolutionary perspective because emotional stimuli signal events or situations that can effect our survival.
They are therefore likely to filter through the selection process to be processed further, both physiologically, for example, through autonomic arousal.
True or false: Even artificial threats stimuli as presented in laboratory tests can pop out and capture our attention.
True.
Consider a lab test with:
1) A picture of a bunch of flowers and one snake.
2) A picture of a bunch of snakes and one flower.
Discrepant fear irrelevant stimulus = flower.
Fear relevant stimuli = snake.
Participants on each trial had to locate the discrepant stimulus. Which picture led to quicker detection?
Participants were far quicker at detecting discrepant FEAR RELEVANT STIMULI from FEAR IRRELEVANT DISTRACTORS (one snake within lots of flowers) than they were at identifying the discrepant fear irrelevant stimuli from fear relevant distractors (one flower within lots of snakes).
Showed a robust pop out effect.
This shows how strong and natural the tendency to detect and respond to actually dangerous situations is.
Similar findings were also reported for identifying a discrepant angry face from a crowd of happy faces.
Researchers studying selective attention biases of individuals with mental health have found that if the threat stimulus (ie. congruent trials) matches their concerns, their response time is:
Quicker.
Whereas, they are slower to respond to neutral stimulus (ie. incongruent trials).
Eg. Visual probe task.
Consider the following images in an experiment:
- A positive eating scenario such as eating something healthy.
- A negative eating scenario such as eating junk food.
- A neutral eating scenario such as a picture of a restaurant.
- A positive body shape stimulus so someone looking of normal weight about to go for a swim.
- A negative body shape stimulus, someone’s figure.
- A neutral body shape stimulus such as the body part.
- Or a neutral weight stimulus such as scales.
What were the results of participants with an eating disorder?
- Attention orienting bias towards negative stimuli.
- Attention avoidance of positive eating stimuli.
- Quicker to respond to the probe behind the neutral stimuli.
Women with eating disorders had an attention orienting bias towards negative eating stimuli and the neutral weight stimuli.
But they attention avoidance to positive eating stimuli.
A CONGRUENT trial involves a probe appearing in the place of a THREATENING stimulus.
An INCONGRUENT trial involves a probe appearing in the place of a NEUTRAL stimulus.
What is the term for the difference between reaction times of a probe on congruent trials versus incongruent trials?
Attention bias index.
List some ways that individual vary from one another in SELECTIVE ATTENTION BIAS to threat.
- They can differ in the degree to which their attention is automatically captured by mild threats, even if briefly presented.
- They can differ in the extent to which they can disengage or unlock their attention from that threat allowing it to disrupt other ongoing cognitive processes.
- And they can differ in the type of threat stimulus that captures their attention.
- People with mental health problems have been found to show heightened attention for threatening stimuli.
What have researchers found about people with mental health problems from the visual probe task?
If the threat stimulus matches their concerns, they are quicker at responding on congruent trials, and slower to respond on incongruent trials.
What this pattern of responding suggests is that their attention had been very quickly captured, and possibly locked in by the presence of the threatening stimulus.
What are two limitations of the visual probe task?
1) It is hard to differentiate between whether it’s as ATTENTION ORIENTING RESPONSE (hypervigilance towards the emotional stimulus response)
OR..
If it is the INABILITY TO DISENGAGE away from the stimulus.
2) Difficult to trace the time course of attention vices.
Hard to determine when attention focus shifts from vigilance to avoidance because the image is too distressing.
What method is used to differentiate whether the eye is moving because of attention or because of stressful stimuli?
The eye tracking method.
This enables a more continuous measure of attention because they can measure:
- Initial fixations to particular stimuli as they appear on a screen.
- Length of time spent gazing at a particular stimulus before a fixation away from the stimulus occurs.
- One can obtain more precise information about the time course of attention vices from early to late.
- And map out the direction of the bias when it changes from vigilance to avoidance.
What is the name of a test where you are shown words in different colors and you have to say the color of the word.
What does it show?
The Emotional Stroop task.
It is used to show differences between anxious and non-anxious people.
Anxious people are much more affected by the threatening content of the word than are non-anxious people.
Words affect attention, which very much depended on the content of the word, and the concerns of the patient.
All anxious patients were disrupted on social threat cues.
Only physical worriers were disrupted on the physical threat words.
People with depression can be more affected by words that trigger inadequacy to reflect their low self-esteem.
What does threat stimuli and negative stimuli do to attention and cognitive resources?
Threat stimuli and negative stimuli can quickly capture attention and drain cognitive resources so that it disrupts ongoing cognitive processing.
This may be an adaptive process because it facilitates our detection of danger and allows us to act.
Being HYPERVIGILANT to a mild threat can be maladaptive and can contribute to psychopathologies.
What is the name of a task where one cue is paired with another consistently across trials, so that the two become associated through the contingency?
Associative learning task.
What were the findings from associative learning tasks that put monetary values into shapes?
There was a beneficial learning effect for the high reward pairing compared to the medium reward and the low reward.
This suggests that by including a reward, learning was enhanced on the simple shape matching task.
What were the findings from associative learning tasks that put “self,” “stranger,” and “friend” into shapes?
Shapes that were paired with the self were much better learned than those for a friend and stranger.
This suggests that self-associations can be as rewarding or at least salient than monetary rewards.
Describe the phenomenon of fear conditioning.
The occurrence of an aversive or unpleasant stimulus can transfer some of the fear provoking effects to other neutral stimuli that are in the environment through association.
Eg. Little Albert.
Eg. Pairing shock with a geometric shape.
People can learn to fear particular objects by being paired with an emotional stimulus.
Furthermore, individuals can generalize their fear.
Sometimes, individuals show slightly elevated fear to the conditioned safe stimulus as well.
Eg. Non-shocking geometric shape.
A gradient of fear responses can be related to the perceptual similarity of the shape to the original conditioned threat stimulus.
There were continuous decreases in fear generalization as the presented stimulus became less similar to the conditioned threat stimulus.
Explain two pathways in which conditioned fear can lead to acquiring phobias.
- DIRECT EXPERIENCE: Fear conditioning can lead to phobias.
- VICARIOUS LEARNING:
Fear acquired by observing fearful responses or through verbal information.
Eg. Children model fear on parents’ responses.
Eg. Visual cliff experiment: babies crawling over glass superimposed over drop in height.
Eg. Information about unknown monster doll.
What are three other terms for vicarious learning?
Observational learning.
Social referencing.
Informational learning.
_____ is the process by which new information is encoded, consolidated, and subsequently retrieved.
Memory.
