Cognition and Emotion Flashcards
Definition of emotion?
- strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others
- instinctive/intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge
What are the effects of emotion on cognition?
- emotional stimuli elicit automatic responses and grab attention
- critical for survival/reproductive success so prioritised
- preparedness (evolved to fear phobic stimuli)
- unconscious emotions can influence perception and behaviours
What is the cognitive bias towards emotional stimuli?
- classic tests have been widely used to demonstrate influence stimuli on attention, memory and decision-making
- the tests are frequently used in clinical psych to assess role of cognitive bias in development/maintenance of disorders
- some are being adapted to treatments to modify cognitive biases
Definition of attention?
-process by which specific stimuli within the external and internal environment are selected for further processing
What are the paradigms used to assess attentional bias?
- detection tasks
- emotional stroop task
- dot probe task
Definition of attentional bias?
- systematic tendency to attend to a particular stimuli over others
- suggested to be an underlying process involved in a range of disorders
What is a detection task?
-if individual is prone to attending more to a particular type of stimulus they should detect it faster if it’s located amongst distractors
What is an emotional stroop task?
- have to read aloud the colour that the words are printed in, have to ignore the content of the word
- compare RT when word content is neutral or related to disorder
- difficulties in interpreting: disorder-relevant words may induce internal attention, may induce emotional reaction that slows response, cognitive avoidance
What is a dot probe task?
- see fixed cross first, then 2 words appear rapidly, then a dot stimulus
- must say whether the dot appeared at the top or the bottom, depending on which word they were looking at they’ll be faster at responding for it
- thought to be better measure of selective attention than stroop
Impact of emotional stimuli in the brain?
- causes early neural responses in the prefrontal prior to identification
- increases functional connectivity between the amygdala and visual cortex, lesion in the amygdala abolishes bias for emotional words
- stimuli can bias competition for processing resources, emotion (like attention) increases visual cortex responses
What are the key mechanisms of memory?
- 3 stages of processing: encoding, storage, retrieval
- each stage may be relevant to development of psychopathology
- number of factors influence what’s encoded/retrieved
How is memory related to the amygdala?
- enhanced memory for positive and negative scenes associated with amygdala activity during encoding
- damage reverses memory bias for emotional more than neutral
- retrieval of autobiographical memories showed strong response, bias in encoding
How can memories be erased?
- can be helpful to alter disturbing memories
- research suggests memories can be modified by blocking their reconsolidation (requires protein synthesis in amygdala)
- anaesthesia may make erasing possible
What is mood-congruent memory?
- selective encoding/retrieval that occurs while individuals are in a mood state consistent with the affective value of the material
- hypothesized to be a factor in depression maintenance, recall more negative things
- those with depression don’t recall autobiographical memories in rich detail
- easier access/activation of associated sad representations in a schema
How do antidepressants effect memory?
- after 7 days controls showed decreased recognition of negative emotional expressions
- showed faster reaction times in classifying positive vs negative, greater immediate free recall of positive words
- increase positive bias in attention and memory in healthy controls
- depression has function of replacing failed goals with new ones (so recalling past is important)
What is attentional bias modification?
- patients with anxiety/depression are trained to attend away from negative stimuli
- can lead to reduction in symptoms
What is cognitive bias modification in obesity?
- training attention and responses away from unhealthy and towards healthy food
- showed reduced brain reward and attention region response to high-calorie food images, reduced monetary valuation, greater body fat loss
What is the appraisal theories of the effect of cognition on emotion?
- start the emotion process
- can occur automatically or consciously
- different levels of appraisal (primary, secondary, reappraisal)
- suggestion that process is too slow and complex to form key part of emotional processing
What is emotion regulation?
- management and control of emotional states by various processes
- affecting one or more points in the emotion generative process
- behavioural control, attentional control, cognitive change
- reinterpreting meaning of a stimulus to change one’s emotional response to it
What are the stages of emotional processing?
- situation
- attention
- appraisal
- response
What are the strategies implicated at different stages of emotional processing?
- situation selection
- situation modification (situation)
- attention deployment (attention stage)
- cognitive change (appraisal)
- response modulation (response)
- some strategies can be purely attentional, some requiring top-down cognitive approach while others in a reactive way
How does regulation link to the brain?
- more associated with DLPFC, dorsal ACG, hippocampus, DMPFC
- VLPFC, orbitofrontal cortex, ventral ACG more associated with subjective feelings and emotional states
- amygdala dampened in regulation due to prefrontal cortex
What is abnormal emotion regulation in depression?
- sustained amygdala response to negative emotional words
- decreased emotion regulation
- inverse relationship between DLPFC and amygdala
- bias towards sad targets linked with increased anterior cingulate response
What are the new experimental treatments for depression targeting brain?
- transcranial direct stimulation (least invasive)
- transcranial magnetic stimulation
- deep brain stimulation (most invasive)
What does brain stimulation show in relation to depression?
- less overactive
- can normalise patterns of activity in those with depression, can decrease brain activity with electrodes
How can brain training improve emotion regulation?
Schweizer et al, 2011+2012
- groups had 20 days of emotional working memory training or control
- processed 2 modalities (audio and visual)
- training activates working-memory network and deactivates emotional regions
What is the somatic marker hypothesis?
Damasio, 1990s
- can develop conditioned physiological arousal responses to emotional events
- when cues that are associated with the event are experienced it can re-trigger those physiological feelings
- feelings are useful in guiding future behaviour and decision making
