Chapter 10: Emotion

Question 1

Affect

Answer 1

Either a discrete emotion that has a relatively short duration or a more diffuse, longer-lasting state such as stress or mood.

Question 2

Affective flexibility

Answer 2

The ability to process the relevance of various emotional stimuli, depending on one’s current goals and motivation.

Question 2

Amygdala

Answer 2

A collection of neurons anterior to the hippocampus in the medial temporal lobe that is involved in emotional processing.

Question 3

Attentional blink

Answer 3

A phenomenon often observed during rapid serial presentations of visual stimuli, in which a second salient target that is presented between 150 and 450 ms after the first one goes undetected.

Question 4

Basic emotion

Answer 4

An emotion with unique characteristics, carved by evolution, and reflected through facial expressions.

Question 5

Complex emotion

Answer 5

A combination of basic emotions that can be identified as an evolved, long-lasting feeling. Some complex emotions may be socially or culturally learned.

Question 6

Core emotional systems

Answer 6

Also called primary process. Any of seven circuits, proposed by Jaak Panksepp, common to all higher animals, that generate both emotional actions and specific autonomic changes that support those actions.

Question 7

Dimensional theories of emotion

Answer 7

Theories that describe emotions that are fundamentally the same but differ along one or more dimensions, such as valence (pleasant to unpleasant, positive to negative) and arousal (very intense to very mild).

Question 8

Emotion

Answer 8

An affective (positive or negative) mental response to a stimulus that is composed of a physiological response, a behavioral response, and a feeling.

Question 9

Emotion generation

Answer 9

A unagreed-upon set of processes that may or may not combine an automatic bottom-up response with a top-down response, which involves memory and/or linguistic representations.

Question 10

Emotion regulation

Answer 10

Voluntary and involuntary processes deployed to manage and respond to emotions.

Question 11

Facial expressions

Answer 11

The nonverbal communication of emotion by the manipulation of particular groups of facial muscles.

Research finding suggest that six basic human facial expressions represent the emotional states anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

Question 12

Fear conditioning

Answer 12

Learning in which a neutral stimulus acquires aversive properties by virtue of being paired with an aversive event.

Question 13

Feeling

Answer 13

Either the sensation of touch or the conscious sensation of an emotion.

Question 14

Flow

Answer 14

As described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the enjoyable state of being in “the zone.” He suggests that people are really happy when totally immersed in a challenging task that closely matches their abilities.

Question 15

Insula

Answer 15

Also called the insular cortex. A part of cortex hidden in the Sylvian fissure. The insula also has extensive reciprocal connections with areas associated with emotion, such as the amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate gyrus; as well as with frontal, parietal, and temporal cortical areas involved with attention, memory, and cognition.

Question 16

Interoception

Answer 16

Physical sensations arising from inside the body such as pain, temperature, hunger, etc.

Question 17

Mood

Answer 17

A long-lasting diffuse affective state that is characterized primarily by a predominance of enduring subjective feelings without an identifiable object or trigger.

Question 18

Reappraisal

Answer 18

A cognitive strategy to reassess an emotion.

Question 19

Somatic marker

Answer 19

A physiological-emotional mechanism that was once theorized to help people sort through possible options and make a decision. Somatic markers were thought to provide a common metric for evaluating options with respect to their potential benefit.

Question 20

Stress

Answer 20

A fixed pattern of physiological and neurohormonal changes that occurs when we encounter a stimulus, event, or thought that threatens us (or we expect will threaten us) in some way.

Question 21

Suppression

Answer 21

Intentionally excluding a thought or feeling from conscious awareness. A strategy for inhibiting an emotion-expressive behavior during an emotionally arousing situation.

Question 22

Extinction

Answer 22

The disappearance of a conditioned response when it is no longer rewarded.