Cognition and Emotion

Question 1

Definition of emotion?

Answer 1

• strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others
• instinctive/intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge

Question 2

What are the effects of emotion on cognition?

Answer 2

• 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

Question 3

What is the cognitive bias towards emotional stimuli?

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

Definition of attention?

Answer 4

-process by which specific stimuli within the external and internal environment are selected for further processing

Question 5

What are the paradigms used to assess attentional bias?

Answer 5

• detection tasks
• emotional stroop task
• dot probe task

Question 6

Definition of attentional bias?

Answer 6

• systematic tendency to attend to a particular stimuli over others
• suggested to be an underlying process involved in a range of disorders

Question 7

What is a detection task?

Answer 7

-if individual is prone to attending more to a particular type of stimulus they should detect it faster if it’s located amongst distractors

Question 8

What is an emotional stroop task?

Answer 8

• 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

Question 9

What is a dot probe task?

Answer 9

• 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

Question 10

Impact of emotional stimuli in the brain?

Answer 10

• 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

Question 11

What are the key mechanisms of memory?

Answer 11

• 3 stages of processing: encoding, storage, retrieval
• each stage may be relevant to development of psychopathology
• number of factors influence what’s encoded/retrieved

Question 12

How is memory related to the amygdala?

Answer 12

• 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

Question 13

How can memories be erased?

Answer 13

• 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

Question 14

What is mood-congruent memory?

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

How do antidepressants effect memory?

Answer 15

• 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)

Question 16

What is attentional bias modification?

Answer 16

• patients with anxiety/depression are trained to attend away from negative stimuli
• can lead to reduction in symptoms

Question 17

What is cognitive bias modification in obesity?

Answer 17

• 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

Question 18

What is the appraisal theories of the effect of cognition on emotion?

Answer 18

• 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

Question 19

What is emotion regulation?

Answer 19

• 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

Question 20

What are the stages of emotional processing?

Answer 20

• situation
• attention
• appraisal
• response

Question 21

What are the strategies implicated at different stages of emotional processing?

Answer 21

• 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

Question 22

How does regulation link to the brain?

Answer 22

• 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

Question 23

What is abnormal emotion regulation in depression?

Answer 23

• 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

Question 24

What are the new experimental treatments for depression targeting brain?

Answer 24

• transcranial direct stimulation (least invasive)
• transcranial magnetic stimulation
• deep brain stimulation (most invasive)

Question 25

What does brain stimulation show in relation to depression?

Answer 25

• less overactive

- can normalise patterns of activity in those with depression, can decrease brain activity with electrodes

Question 26

How can brain training improve emotion regulation?

Schweizer et al, 2011+2012

Answer 26

• 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

Question 27

What is the somatic marker hypothesis?

Damasio, 1990s

Answer 27

• 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