Cognition and Emotion Flashcards
What evolutionary constraints do living animals have as well as survival and reproduction?
Unconscious mind and cognitive biases
What are overwhelming emotions?
- Central to who we are and what we do
- Not a regular emotion
- Can change the way we think
Give examples of overwhelming emotions
- joy/ecstasy
- grief
- love
What are moral emotions?
- Regulates social behvaiour and social status
- Interpersonal
Give examples of moral emotions.
- Anger
- Disgust
- Shame
What are subtle emotions?
- Occur in our everyday lives
Give examples of subtle emotions.
- Boredom
- Happiness
Why do we have emotions?
- Guide our lives and we learn from them
- Provide meaning to life
- Related to mental health
- Chronic negative emotions can lead to life feeling miserable and not worth living
What is the role of emotion?
To monitor our current state and adjust behaviour
What are primary emotions?
Used mostly for survival and so animals share these with humans e.g. happiness, sadness
What are secondary emotions?
Uniquely human emotions e.g. remorse and hope
What are the 3 main aspects of emotion?
- Cognitive component
- Overt expression of internal state
- Physiological experience e.g. heart rate
What evidence is there that emotion is a basic biological process and not a learnt behaviour?
- No differences between blind or sighted athletes in terms of facial actions of facial emotion configurations.
How do we physically show emotion?
- Facial Expressions
- Body language
Why is emotional expression important?
- Social interactions
- Allows us to infer how others are feeling/thinking
- Relevant to approaching/avoiding others
- Significant for attracting friends and intimate partners
How are emotions related to autonomic arousal?
- Emotions are usually accompanied by arousal of the autonomic nervous system
- E.g. release of adrenaline, heart rate, breathing, blood pressure changes
How does a polygraph test work?
- Measures indicators of autonomic reactions to inhibiting the truth (e.g. sweating and heart rate)
- Most people find lying stressful
- Galvanic skin response (GSR)
- Skin conductance response (SCR)
What are the 2 main theories of emotion?
- James-Lange theory
- Cannon-Bard theory
What is the James-Lange theory?
- An embodied account of emotion
- Feedback from the body causes an emotional response
Explain the James-Lange theory?
- feedback from your body subsequently feeds into the cognitive awareness system
- e.g. we feel happy because we are smiling
- Fake it til you make it
What evidence is there for James-Lange theory of emotion?
- Laughing (thinking jokes are funnier when smiling already)
- Botox injections (inhibiting movement of muscles associated with worry/anxiety can reduce feelings of depression)
- Beta blockers (suppressing signals from the body e.g. suppressing pounding heart rate and tight chest from anxiety to reduce anxiety)
What is the Cannon-Bard theory?
Emotions can be experienced independently of body states such as autonomic responses - AR’s can be ambiguous and slower than the experienced emotion.
How is the amygdala linked with emotion?
- Fight or flight
- Receives rapid visual info from the thalamus
- More primitive part of the brain
- Encoding of stimuli often subconscious and faster than conscious processing
In monkeys, how do amygdala lesions impact emotion?
- Result in Kluver-Bucy syndrome
- Impaired learning from emotional stimuli
- Impairs their ability to know things like snakes are dangerous
How do amygdala lesions impact humans?
Impairs the recognition of fear in other faces with some deficit of other emotions such as anger and distrust.
How is the anterior cingulate cortex linked to emotion?
- Processing emotional aspects of pain
- Empathy: activates when others in pain
- Involved in detecting errors to avoid errors in the future
How is the insula linked to expression perception?
- Patients with Huntington’s have deficits in recognising expressions of disgust
- Linked to the amount of insula damage
How is the insula linked to disgust?
- Involved in processing emotional aspects of disgust essential for survival in avoiding poison
- activates when others are disgusted
- also disgusted by people such as drug addicts and homeless (increased insula activity)
How is the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) linked to emotion?
- Computes the current motivational value of rewards
- also associated with with regret - when we make a choice and the reward is less than we hoped
How is the ventral striatum linked to emotion?
- stimulating ventral striatum associated with pleasure and reward
- part of the dopamine network
- sex, drugs, rock & roll
How does the attentional blink task work?
Presenting stimuli one after the other and the basic task is to see is there is an X in the line of list. Most people can say yes. It’s not only the X but also to name the white leader (about 50% accurate)
Why do we use the attentional blink task?
To investigate emotional pre-attentive processing.
How do you make the attentional blink task emotive?
- Fifteen words briefly presented sequentially
- Observers asked to ignore words in black and to indicate the identity of the two target words in green
- T2 is emotional
What effects were shown from the emotive attentional blink task?
- Control PPs show reduced attentional blink effects when T2 is emotional
- Rapid pre-attentive processing of emotion facilitates perceptual processes.
How does bilateral amygdala damage affect attentional blink task results?
- Showed no difference between emotional and neutral stimuli
How do moral, emotional, and moral + emotional stimuli affect the attentional blink task?
- They capture attention to a greater extent than neutral words
- Words related to both morality and emotion are prioritised in visual attention (explaining why they go viral)
What has the attentional blink study shown us? (3)
- High level semantic processes such as word recognition take place unconsciously in a rapid sequence
- The amygdala is important for emotional word processing
- The emotional and moral content of tweets facilitates conscious detection
What evidence is there that emotional stimuli captures attention?
- Stroop task
- Pop-out effects
How does the stroop task suggest that emotional words capture attention?
- Emotional words disrupt naming the ink
How do pop-out effects suggest that emotion captures attention?
- Emotional, esp angry faces, do capture attention
- Live creatures capture attention
Do emotional stimuli maintain attention?
- When attention is oriented to an angry face, it is harder to withdraw
- Response to the target was slowed when previously attending to an angry face and now have to orient to opposite side of the screen
- Attentional blink task also demonstrates that it is hard to disengage attention from emotional stimuli
How can anxiety influence the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli?
- Those perceiving ambiguous stimuli with anxiety perceived the negative meaning such as ‘die’ rather than ‘dye’ and ‘pain’ rather than ‘pane’
- ‘examining emily’s growth’ - height or cancer?
How are attention, fragrance, and mood linked?
- Study examined whether manipulating mood via fragrance could facilitate such demanding attention tasks
- Results provide evidence to indicate that fragrances can enhance signal detectability in a task demanding sustained attention.
- A pleasant fragrance can improve performance on a vigilance task
What is the link between disgust and perceptions of obese women?
- Disgust predicted prejudice
- Obese women elicited more disgust + had more unfavourable attitudes towards her including wanting social distance + more negative stereotypes
What is the link between disgust and gay men?
- Strong negative attitudes towards gay men
- Lack of support for gay marriage
- More disgusted by gay men than lesbian women
- Homonegativity
How do animal studies show that gaze behaviour is a basic process?
- Chimps understand social meaning of eye gaze
- Dogs read human eye gaze where wolves do not
- Pigs are socially intelligent and also look for eye contact
Explain attention and liking in children.
- They think someone likes something more simply because they are looking at something
Explain attention and liking in adults?
- When our attention is repeatedly oriented towards an object by another person, we start to like the object more
What are primary reinforcers?
- Food and water - need to stay alive
What are secondary reinforcers?
- Associated with primary reinforcers
- E.g. money needed to exchange for food and water
What is emotional classical conditioning?
- Autonomic conditioning: bodily responses e.g. rapid heart rate + sweating (mosy studied is fear conditioning)
- Evaluative conditoning: conscious preference to like a stimulus more or less (most studied is adverts)
What parts of the brain are associated with autonomic physiological conditioning?
Mediated by the amygdala
What parts of the brain are associated with evaluative conditioning?
Conscious explicit report mediated by the hippocampus
How is conditioning used in advertising?
- Product paired with positive unconditioned stimulus such as a famous actor and the neutral product becomes associated with the positive stimulus - becoming more positively evaluated by people
How effective is evaluative conditioning?
- Results suggest unconcsious conditioning can make us like different things, even nonsense words
How is operant conditioning applied to emotions?
- Social rewards
- How others respond to our behaviour shapes and influences what we do and say in the world
- Being successful or prestigious is rewarding & feels good
What does motivation for goal-directed behaviour depend on?
- The expected value of the anticipated reward
Do participants respond faster to social or monetary rewards?
- Significantly faster for all levels of reward compared to no reward
- Male PPs reacted faster to monetary stimuli
- Females did not differ with type or magnitude
What brain areas are activated when anticipating monetary and social rewards?
- Men: activation in the prospect of monetary rewards encompasses a wide network of mesolimbic brain regions compared to limited for social
How does the striatum respond to monetary and social rewards?
- activations for both types of reward in left
- mPFC was significantly enhanced when a subject’s own reputation was presented, regardless of the reward level
How does social media behaviour reflect operant conditioning?
- More passive behaviour e.g. scrolling (social comparison)
- More active behaviour e.g. posting
- gives a trickle of notifications to keep you coming back (variable ration reinforcement)
How can observational learning be applied to monkeys?
- Monkeys are afraid of snakes just like most people
- When captive monkeys are exposed to wild monkeys to are scared of snakes, they start to evoke fear responses
What is the mirror system?
A subset of neurons in premotor cortex fire when the monkey carries out a particular action and when it sees the same action being carried out by another person.
What is the chameleon effect?
- People unconsciously mimic the postures of the people they interact with resulting in pro-scoail behaviour
- When people are in comfortable social situations
What is the chameleon effect in the workplace?
- When a person’s actions are mimicked, they tend to like the mimicker more (e.g. waitress getting more tips)
What is emotional mimicry?
- When observing the emotional response of another individual, learning might be facilitated by simulation (we feel what they are feeling)
- Our own facial muscles copy those of another person
What is the zygomaticus?
Muscle which allows us to smile
What is the corrugator?
Muscle which allows us to frown
How does mimicry apply to zygomaticus and corrugator muscles?
- When PPs looked at another person who is happy, there was increased activity of the zygomaticus muscle
- When people are looking at another person who is angry there was increased activity of the currogator muscle
What is the mere exposure effect?
It is possible to change an emotional response without any associations with positive or negative stimuli.
By passively presenting neutral stimuli, they can become more preferred.
- Stimuli that have been presented in the past are preferred more than novel stimuli
Is the mere exposure effect conscious?
No, the effect is stronger when people are unaware of the stimuli.
Explain the link between arousal and memory.
- Arousal influences memory consolidation more than emotion valence
- Arousal can be associated with neutral stimuli like numbers
- Negative emotional reaction can lead to arousal + arousal can help store memories
What is the Yerkes-Dodson Law
At either arousal ends, efficiency of memory is quite poor
How do people recall highly arousing pictures after a year?
Better than low arousing pics
Why does increased arousal facilitate memory?
Automatic encoding of emotion that facilitates consolidation.
We are primed to encode emotional information because of survival and reporoduction.
What brain structures are involved in arousal-memory interactions?
Amygdala moderates emotional memory
- If the amygdala is more active, stimulus is more likely to be recalled later
How does short-term stress affect memory?
Pre-talk stress reduced a person’s ability to retrieve information from memory
How does short-term stress affect attention?
Short term mem: Impaired
Verbal fluency mem: Impaired
Stroop interfeence: unaffected
What is long-term stress?
- Individual is under stress for prolonged periods
- Hormonal changes
- Glucocorticoids are stress hormones released from the adrenal gland
What are the affects of glucocorticoids being released?
- reduced firing rate of hippocampal neurons
- impaired memory performance
- hippocampal atrophy after long-term exposure to stress
How do we test long-term stress in humans?
- Drugs that artificially increase glucocorticoid levels and compare to placebo
- Case-studies
What do drug studies show about the effects of long-term stress on humans?
- After 4 days there was evidence for impaired memory performance
What evidence is there that stress causes hippocampal atrophy?
- PTSD patients show hippocampal attrophy (associated with memory)
Does PTSD cause hippocampal atrophy or do smaller hippocampi predict PTSD?
- Size of hippocampus is negatively correlated with PTSD
- Results suggest individuals who have a normal hippocampus are protected from developing PTSD even after combat
What is state-dependent retrieval?
E.g. being drunk and you may not be able to recall when sober.
What is the link between extreme mood and memory?
- Actions may be carried out in extreme emotion such as rage
- In up to 30% of cases, culprit claims to have no memory
Explain selective encoding of mood congruent material?
- e.g. sad readers attend more to sad material and identify more with a sad character from a story, and recalled more about that character
- here emotion serves as a memory unit & aids retrieval
What is the Velten technique?
- Studying effects of mood on perception and memory
- PPs fill in a Qnaire to assess mood
- Mood induction procedure e.g. Velten where PPs read self-referential statements
- Or show funny or sad movie or listen to exciting/depressing music
- Second Qnaire to check mood change
What results were found from the Velten technique?
More happy memories recalled when induced to feel happier and vice versa
Explain automatic mood induction via odor
- Technique so PPs don’t know emotion effects on memory are being investigated
- positive or negative states in a subtle way
What effects were found on mood induction via odor?
- Pleasant odor reduced retrieval of negative memories
What are flashbulb memories?
- Accurate memories, almost like a photograph
- Recalling details like where they were and who they were with at the time
What is positive memory bias?
- we remember more happy events and things about our lives
- could be because we experience more happy things in our lives
- improves our wellbeing
