Cognition and emotion

Question 1

What is cognition?

Answer 1

‘The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses’
Involves knowledge, attention, perception (and mental imagery), language, memory and executive function (cognitive control, decision-making, reasoning, inhibition, goal-maintenance, task-switching, problem-solving).

Question 2

Cognition vs Affect?

Answer 2

Thomas Aquinas - was the first to divide mental proesses into cognitive and affective.
Now we think cognitive processes can include affective information. ‘Hot’ cognition involves affective processes, uses emotions to guide decisions. ‘Cold’ cognition is purely logical.
Cf. Damasio’s ‘somatic marker theory’, where decision making is guided both by cost-benefit analyses and by emotion, to increase speed and reduce cognitive load.

Plato thought ‘passions’ interfere with ‘reason’
Kant thought we had ‘judgement’, ‘practical reason’ and ‘pure reason’.
In the 1800s was the first separation of conation (will), cognition and affect.

Question 3

What is affect? Emotion vs mood

Answer 3

Emotion - a short-lived behavioural, physiological and affective response to a significant event. Function to bias action. Predominantly subcortical activation.
[[Feeling - subjective representation of an emotion]]
Mood - lower-level longer-lasting state. Function to bias cognition. Predominantly cortical activation.

Question 4

Dimensional vs basic emotion approach

Answer 4

Lenn et al - devised a grid used in a ‘dimensional’ account of emotion - the 2 dimensions are valence and arousal.

Ekman - 6 Basic emotions - non-reducible, non-overlapping, cross-cultural, with conserved facial expressions/physiology. Happiness, Sadness, Surprise, Disgust, Fear, Anger.

Question 5

Primacy of affect - you can have emotion without cognition

Answer 5

Zajonc - ‘mere exposure effect’:
Presented shapes for sub 5 msec, so not consciously available.
Asked subjects to pick shapes they recognised, 50% success.
Asked other subjects to pick shapes they preferred, 60% were shapes that had been presented

Question 6

Primacy of cognition

Answer 6

Lazarus - played people a clip of aboriginal circumcision ceremony, with a soundtrack suggesting the boys were actors, or one suggesting they weren’t.
Self-report AND physiological measures of affective impact were more negative when subjects thought they weren’t actors.

…is this also evidence for cognitive reappraisal being an effective strategy to reduce negative emotional impact?

Question 7

Appraisal theory

Answer 7

Lazarus - our emotional response to something is determined by three levels of appraisal
primary appraisal - is this situation positive, stressful, or irrelevant to wellbeing?
secondary appraisal - stock-taking of resources at ones disposal to cope with the situation
re-appraisal - situation and coping strategy monitored, primary and secondary appraisals modified if necessary.

This can all occur on a conscious/volitional level, or an unconscious/automatic level.
Now that we know some of cognition is unconscious (e.g. implicit memory), the fact that appraisal does not require conscious cognition does not mean it doesn’t require cognition.

And vice versa - emotion can affect appraisal

Question 8

Arguments against appraisal theory

Answer 8

Doesn’t account for fast production of differentiated emotion, or lack of conscious awareness of stimulus

Perhaps appraisal is a component of, not antecedent of emotion

Perhaps the different appraisal levels occur in parallel from low-level action tendencies to higher-level conscious decisions

Little evidence for mechanisms of automatic appraisal

Recently, some neural correlates found - e.g. amygdala as relevance detector

Question 9

Information-processing approaches

Answer 9

Automatic appraisal may direct attention towards negative stimuli, leading to subconscious cognitive biases

These aren’t taken account of in subjective mood measures like questionnaires.

A focus on how people process information, in experimental cognitive psychology, can link between research in neurological and social-cognitive levels.

Question 10

Does affect modulate attentional/perceptual processes?

Early vs late selection debate - biased competition model

Answer 10

Does perception require attention, or attention require perception?

Perceptual resources are limited, stimuli are prioritised via attentional and affective processes

Affective salience determined by novelty, how aversive/pleasant, relevance to goals, certainty, compatibility with personal or social standards etc.

E.g. Optical illusions prove perception can fail. People think a slope is steeper if they’re sad or anxious, so it’s affected by affect.

Attentional mechanisms must be selective (to direct resources efficiently) and flexible (what is relevant now may not be later).

Some things have intrinsic salience (think snake neurons), others acquire salience.

Question 11

Does affect modulate attentional/perceptual processes?

Feature integration theory

Answer 11

Single features ‘pop out’ at us, combinations require more serious cognitive search.
Reaction time increased with set size only when searching for conjunctions of features - stayed the same for single feature

Question 12

Does affect modulate attentional/perceptual processes?

Anger superiority effect

Answer 12

Angry faces ‘pop out’ at us. Negative stimuli induce attentional bias
Hansen and Hansen 1988 - Reaction time increased with set size only when searching for happy faces - stayed the same for angry faces.
Fox et al 2000 - replicated results using schematics instead of photos, to control for non-emotional differences between faces.
Ohman et al - used fear relevant vs fear irrelevant stimuli (snakes vs flowers). Effect stronger in high AT subjects. In a separate paper, no effect seen when searching for sad faces - so it’s not just about valence of emotion.

Question 13

Does affect modulate attentional/perceptual processes?

Emotional stroop test

Answer 13

Pratto and John 1991 - reaction time was longer for negative words, suggesting that a negative semantic meaning was a bigger distraction from the colour of the word than a positive semantic meaning
Epp et al 2012 - meta-analysis. Depressed patients are worse at both normal Stroop and emotional stroop - i.e. emotion has modified their attentional processes. Effect correlated with depression severity. However, no strong emotion-congruent bias.

Question 14

Does affect modulate attentional/perceptual processes?

Emotion can improve perception

Answer 14

Phelps et al 2006 - brief presentation of fearful face cue where a gabor patch target would subsequently appear improved perception or orientation (contrast sensitivity) compared to neutral cue. Was also better than distributed fearful face cues, showing that emotion interacts with attention.

Question 15

Does affect modulate attentional/perceptual processes?

Neural activity

Answer 15

Emotion AND attention modulate neural representations
Vuilluemier et al 2001 - extrastriate cortex (involved in sensory processing) more active when viewing emotional stimuli, and more active for attended than for unattended faces.
Early PET and fMRI studies found visual cortical areas more active when viewing fearful or disgusted expressions
Ewbank et al 2009 - high AT led to increased right amygdala activity for /attended angry/ faces, and increased left amygdala activity for /unattended fearful/ faces.

Question 16

Does affect modulate attentional/perceptual processes?

Amygdala involvement

Answer 16

vuilleumier et al 2004 - hippocampal damaged patients showed increased fusiform and occipital cortex activity when viewing fearful vs neutral faces. Amygdala damaged patients did not.
Also, peak attentional effect (attention to faces vs attention to houses) was the same as peak emotional effect (fearful vs neutral faces).

Question 17

2 mechanisms of prioritising affective stimuli

Answer 17

1. Threat-related stimuli activate the amygdala, (responsible for emotion), which then modulates the sensory cortex via feedback loops resulting in more extensive and in-depth processing of the stimuli
2. Affective stimuli activate frontoparietal cortex, (contains a priority map for visual stimuli, has input from evaluative brain centres like insula and amygdala, and is responsible for attentional control), which then projects to sensory cortex

These are both consistent with enhancement of perceptual acuity (Phelps et al 2006) and increased allocation of attention (Hansen and Hansen 1988, Fox et al 2000)

Amygdala and OFC respond to emotionally relevant stimuli regardless of attention. Superior temporal and ACC respond to emotionally relevant stimuli only when attention is directed
Vuilleumier et al 2002 - In a patient with hemispheric neglect from an inferior parietal cortex lesion, fearful faces caused amygdala activity even if the patient couldn’t consciously ‘see’ them, i.e. if they were on the ‘neglected’ side.

Question 18

Are affective events better remembered than neutral ones?

Implicit memory

Answer 18

Dr Claperede - a psychologist, had to reintroduce himself to his amnestic patient every time she came back to him. One time he hid a tack in his hand and pricked her - the next time, she wouldn’t shake his hand, but couldn’t remember why.
Johnson et al 1985 - Korsakoff’s patients were shown two photos of men, with biographical information depicting one as a ‘good guy’ and one as a ‘bad guy’. After an interval, they recalled almost none of the biographical info, but showed a strong preference for the ‘good guys’. Impression ratings were less extreme than controls, though.

Question 19

Are affective events better remembered than neutral ones?

More vivid memories

Answer 19

Reisberg 1988 - correlation between vividness and emotionality ratings highest for fearful and sad events, but still positive for happy and angry events.
9/11 study - people had high confidence that memory was correct, and memories were high in vividness. But not necessarily more accurate.

Question 20

Are affective events better remembered than neutral ones?

Explicit memory

Answer 20

Ochner - Remember/Know paradigm. Negative stimuli were more likely to be ‘remembered’, positive ‘known’. So recollection and episodic memory boosted by negative and arousing stimuli, familiarity and semantic memory boosted by positive.
Sharot et al 2004 - accuracy for negative vs neutral pictures did not differ, but there were more ‘remember’ than ‘know’ responses for negative stimuli, whereas neutral had the same number of each.

Question 21

Are affective events better remembered than neutral ones?

Potential mechanisms

Answer 21

1. Affective events are more unusual, so have a more distinct memory trace less vulnerable to interference.
2. Affective events are often related to important life events, so may be rehearsed more
3. Affective events often draw more attention, which enhances encoding - e.g. PTSD Brewin account, whereby emotional events are situationally accessible and hence will be retrieved and reconsolidated more frequently.

Question 22

Are affective events better remembered than neutral ones?

Arousal theory

Answer 22

Main theory is that negative stimuli are better remembered because they are more arousing, but this is hard to prove because often valence is confounded with arousal. Also negative stimuli differ from neutral stimuli by various other factors like visual complexity, relevance, salience, amount of red. These can also impact appraisal.

Croucher et al 2011 - fearful stimuli are highly arousing and negative, disgusting stimuli are moderately arousing and negative, so you’d expect they’d be recollected less well. But they were recollected substantially better!

Question 23

Are affective events better remembered than neutral ones?

Personal impact theory

Answer 23

Croucher et al 2011 - Asked subjects to indicate how much a stimulus created an instant impact on them personally, regardless of any particular feelings invoked. I.e. an undifferentiated emotional response. Stimuli with a high impact rating had a higher encoding rating (determined by remember/know paradigm).
Ewbank et al 2009 - more amygdala activity for high than low impact images, matched for arousal.

Question 24

Mood Congruent Memory

Bower’s network theory of mood

Answer 24

Bower 1981 - Emotions are nodes in a network, with connections to numerous other nodes inc related semantic items, other emotions, outputs (like behaviours and response patterns).
A node can be activated by external or internal stimuli, and activity will spread to other nodes in the network to produce a coherent ‘mood’.

Question 25

Mood Congruent Memory

Encoding vs retrieval

Answer 25

People in an induced happy mood seek out and pay more attention to happy stimuli, including spending more time studying material congruent to their mood state

Material learned in a particular mood state is more likely to be recalled when individual is in that same state.
However, generally no effect seen with recall of word lists
Effects are more consistent for real-life events and autobiographical memory than lab-based tasks.

Question 26

Are affective events better remembered than neutral ones?

Gist vs detail

Answer 26

Easterbrook 1959 - emotional arousal causes narrowing of attention to centre of a scene, with neglect of periphery - accounts for Loftus’s ‘weapon-focus effect’ 1975. So memory enhanced for ‘gist’ but not ‘detail’.
Adolphs et al 2001 - unilateral amygdala damaged patients performed as brain-damaged controls, all remembering gist of aversive events better than neutral. Bilateral amygdala damaged patient was reversed, remembering gist much better for neutral event than aversive. Also, looking only at aversive event memory, bilateral damage game inferior gist memory but superior visual detail memory. Authors suggest that the amygdala suppresses memory for detail, and the amygdala filters the encoding of relevant information from threat-related stimuli .

Loftus and Palmer - using more emotional words altered the details people thought they remembered about a car crash… so emotion even at retrieval can impact memory.

Question 27

Emotional effect on memory - amygdala mechanism

Answer 27

Cahill et al 1996

1. emotional effects on memory require the amygdala
2. emotional arousal can affect explicit memory through stress hormone release that interacts with the amygdala
3. the amygdala can affect explicit memory by communicating with other brain regions
4. the amygdala can modulate memory specifically by affecting consolidation processes in regions such as the hippocampus

Hamann et al 1999 - amygdala and hippocampal activity is correlated with enhancement of recognition memory by emotional arousal