Chapter 12 – Emotional Behaviours Flashcards
Emotional situations arouse the:
Autonomic nervous system
Proposal that an event first provokes the autonomic arousal and skeletal responses and that the feeling aspect of emotion is the perception of those responses
James-Lange theory
William James of the James-Lange theory said that an emotion has three components:
Cognitions, actions, and feelings
The cognitive aspect comes first – you quickly appraise something as good, bad, frightening, or whatever. Your appraisal of the situation leads to an appropriate action, such as running away, attacking, or sitting motionless with your heart racing. The arousal and actions lead to emotions, the feeling aspect of an emotion
Condition when output from the autonomic nervous system to the body fails
Pure autonomic failure
Heartbeat and other organ activities continue, but the nervous system no longer regulates them
The James-Lange theory leads to two predictions:
People with weak autonomic or skeletal responses should feel less emotion, and causing or increasing someone’s responses should enhance an emotion
What does the James-Lange theory predict about people with pure autonomic failure, who do not react to stressful experiences with changes in heart rate, blood pressure, or sweating? What do the findings indicate?
According to the theory, we would expect such people to report no emotions.
In fact, they report “having” the same emotions as anyone else. They have little difficulty identifying what emotion a character in a story would probably experience. However, they say they feel their emotions must less intensely than before. They are presumably referring to the cognitive aspect when they report emotions. Their decreased emotional feeling is consistent with predictions from the theory.
Describe studies using botulism toxin or Botox which blocks transmission at synapses and nerve-muscle junctions in the context of feeling emotions.
When used to paralyze the muscles for frowning, people become slightly slower at reading unhappy sentences – evidently an inability to frown interferes with processing unpleasant information.
In people with all facial muscles temporarily paralyzed, they reported weaker than usual emotional responses when watching short videos.
People with brain damage that prevents voluntary facial movements have trouble recognizing other people’s emotional expressions, especially those of fear.
The implication of all these studies is that feeling a body change is important for feeling an emotion.
Period marked by extreme sympathetic nervous system arousal
Panic attack
Describe how researchers got participants to smile and frown while concealing the purpose of the study, and how smiling and frowning affected their emotions
Smile: asked participants to hold a pen in their mouth’s either with their teeth or their lips and to examine a page of newspaper comic strips. Most people rate cartoons funnier when holding a pen with their teeth – which forces a smile – than when holding it with their lips – which prevents a smile. The sensation of smiling increases happiness, although only slightly.
Frown: said they wanted to test people’s ability to do a cognitive task and a motor task at the same time. The cognitive task was to examine photographs and rate their pleasantness or unpleasantness. For the motor task, researchers attached golf tees to each of the persons eyebrows and said to try to keep the tips of the golf tees touching each other – the only way to do that was to frown. People given this instruction rated the photographs as more unpleasant than the average for people who were not induced to frown
People with this rare condition cannot move their facial muscles to make a smile, but they nevertheless experience happiness and amusement, although they have trouble making friends because other people react to the lack of smiling
Möbius syndrome
According to the James-Lange theory, what kind of person should feel no emotions?
Someone who had no muscle movements and no perceivable changes in any organ should feel no emotions. However, such a person might still recognize the cognitive aspects of emotion
How did researchers get people to smile or frown without using those words?
They got people to smile by telling them to hold a pen between their teeth. They got people to frown by attaching golf tees to their eyebrows and then telling them to keep the two tees touching each other
Interlinked structures that form a border around the brain stem.
The forebrain areas surrounding the thalamus.
Has been regarded as critical for emotion
Limbic system
What areas in the brain show response to emotional stimuli?
The frontal and temporal cortices show many dots. But the most salient point of this research is the variability of location for each emotion. The results apparently depend more on the details of the procedure than on which emotion was targeted.
No one has demonstrated cells that respond only to a particular unpleasant emotion, such as sadness or fear.
Only disgust seems to be associated with the response of a particular brain area:
The insular cortex or insula is strongly activated if you see a disgusting picture or the facial expression of someone who is feeling disgusted.
The insula is the primary taste cortex, so to react with disgust is to react as if something tasted bad
The insula is important for which kind of emotion, and which kind of sensation?
The insula is important for disgust and taste
Left brain hemispheric activity marked by low to moderate autonomic arousal and a tendency to approach, which could characterize either happiness or anger
Behavioural activation system BAS
Right brain hemispheric activity, which increases attention and arousal, inhibits action, and stimulates emotions such as fear and disgust
Behavioural inhibition system BIS
The difference between the hemispheres and emotion relates to personality: on average, people with greater activity in the frontal cortex of the ____ hemisphere tend to be happier, more outgoing, and more fun-loving. People with greater ____-hemisphere activity tend to be socially withdrawn, less satisfied with life, and prone to unpleasant emotions
Left; right
The right hemisphere appears to be more responsive to emotional stimuli than the left and people with damage to the right temporal cortex have trouble identifying other people’s emotional expressions or even saying whether two people are expressing the same emotion or different ones.
What happened when people with left-hemisphere brain damage watched video tapes of 10 people describing themselves honestly during one speech and dishonestly during another?
The only group tested that performed better than chance was a group of people with left-hemisphere brain damage who got 60% correct – not great, but at least better than chance.
Evidently, the right hemisphere is better not only at expressing emotions but also at detecting other peoples emotions. With the left hemisphere out of the way, the right hemisphere was free to do what it does best
What are the contributions of the right hemisphere to emotional behaviours and interpreting other peoples emotions?
Activation of the right hemisphere is associated with withdrawal from events and social contact. The right hemisphere is also more specialized than the left for interpreting other people’s expressions of emotions.
Describe the functions of emotions
Fear alerts us to escape from danger. Anger directs us to attack an intruder. Disgust tells us to avoid something that might cause illness.
Emotions provide a useful guide when we need to make a quick decision- like when you have a gut feeling
Describe how most people respond to the four dilemmas where you can save five people by killing one person.
The trolly dilemma, the footbridge dilemma, the lifeboat dilemma, the hospital dilemma
The decisions do not feel the same although you have to kill one person in all of them to save five others.
Most people say it is right to pull the switch in the trolly dilemma to switch the track headed toward one person instead of five. If you were say yes in the foot bridge and lifeboat dilemmas. In the foot bridge dilemma, you push a heavyset stranger off the foot bridge and onto a track where a trolly is headed toward five people. In the lifeboat dilemma, you push one person off the boat so it will not sink.
Almost no one endorses killing one person to say five others in the hospital dilemma, where you kill a visitor whose organs can save five patients.
Brain scans show that contemplating the foot bridge or lifeboat dilemma activate brain areas known to respond to emotions, including parts of the prefrontal cortex and cingulate gyrus, as well as responses in the amygdala.
What happens to decision making after brain damage that impairs emotions?
Damaged parts of the prefrontal cortex blunts peoples emotion in most regards, except for an occasional outburst of anger. It also impairs decision-making: people often make impulsive decisions without pausing to consider the consequences, including how they will feel after a possible mistake. When given a choice, they frequently make a quick decision and then immediately sigh or wince, knowing that they have made the wrong choice. Their decisions often are unemotional.
After damage to a particular part of the prefrontal cortex – the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – people seem deficient in their sense of guilt, both in every day life and in laboratory situations. In the economic game of the dictator and trust, people with damage here give less, showing decreased trust. If they are in the position of trustee, they keep all or nearly all of the money instead of returning it. In short, they show less than normal concern for others.
People with damage to either the prefrontal cortex or the amygdala are slow in processing emotional information and show no nervous tension when drawing from decks A and B in the Iowa gambling task. In short, failure to anticipate the unpleasantness of likely outcomes leads to bad decisions.
However, sometimes emotions can interfere with good decisions as in A panic situation of sliding on icy roads.
If brain damage impairs someone’s emotions, what happens to the person’s decision making?
After brain damage that impairs emotion, people make impulsive decisions, evidently because they do not quickly imagine how bad a poor decision might make them feel
What relationship did Caspe et al. (2002) report between the enzyme MAOa and antisocial behavior?
Overall, people with genes for high or low production of MAOa do not differ significantly in their probability of antisocial behavior. However, among those who suffered serious maltreatment during childhood, people with lower levels of the enzyme showed higher rates of antisocial behaviour.
This is an apparent demonstration of an interaction between genetics and environment
Describe hormonal contributions to aggressiveness
Male aggressive behaviour depends heavily on testosterone for many mammals, especially in the reproductive season.
Men of the same age with higher testosterone levels have been found to commit more violent behavior, but the effects are small.
According to the “triple imbalance hypothesis”, the reason testosterone’s effects are unimpressive is that violence depends on other chemicals as well, especially cortisol and serotonin. Cortisol, which increases under stressful conditions, increases fear, and a decrease is associated with loss of inhibitions. Therefore, aggression tends to be highest when testosterone levels are high and cortisol levels are low. Serotonin also tends to inhibit violent impulses.
In one study, after women receive the testosterone, most became less accurate at recognizing facial expressions of anger. Other research shows that testosterone increases responses of the amygdala to photos showing angry expression’s. Testosterone affects certain brain areas differently, increasing the responses of the emotion-related areas, while decreasing the ability of the cerebral cortex to identify the emotion consciously. The result could be increased emotional arousal and decreased ability to regulate that emotion deliberately.
How does testosterone influence emotional and cognitive responses to a facial expression of anger?
It decreases the ability to recognize the expression consciously but increases the responses in emotion-related areas of the brain
Release and re-synthesis of a neurotransmitter
Turnover
Serotonin’s main metabolite
5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA)
Describe the role of serotonin turnover in aggressive behaviour
Comparing different genetic strains of mice, researchers found that social isolation lowered serotonin turnover by the greatest amount in the genetic strains that reacted with the greatest amount of fighting after social isolation. Social isolation does not decrease serotonin turnover in female mice in any genetic strain, and it does not make the females aggressive – therefore, serotonin’s effects combine with those of testosterone (triple imbalance hypothesis).
In humans, many studies have found low serotonin turnover in people with a history of violent behaviour and people who attempt suicide by violent means. Follow-up studies on people released from prison have found that those with lower serotonin turnover had a greater probability of further convictions for violent crimes. The effects are not sufficiently powerful that we could use blood tests to make important decisions about individuals.
People vary in the gene that controls tryptophan hydroxylase, the enzyme that converts tryptophan into serotonin. People with less active forms of this enzyme are more likely than average to report frequent anger and aggression and more likely to make violent suicide attempts.
