Cognition & emotion 2 Flashcards
Does affect require cognition? The primacy debate
No
Zajonc (1984)- ‘affect and cognition are separate and partially independent systems’
Cognitive processes not necessary to produce affective response to stimulus
Mere exposure experiment (Zajonc)
Presented items subliminally to participants
Participants then make judgements to stimuli set presented above plus new/novel stimuli
Results: patients gave higher liking ratings to perviously ‘seen’ stimuli
Suggests an emotional response despite no cognitive processing of subliminal stimuli
Emotion excedes cognition so cognition not required for an emotional experience
Primacy debate
Does emotion precede cognition?
Murphy & Zajonc (1993) priming experiment
Ratings of liking influenced by the affective/emotional primes but only when presented for 4 ms (not enough time to realise effect of prime)
At 1 sec, cognitive processes kick in and have time to realise response is due to prime not stimuli
Does affect require cognition? The cognition/emotion debate
Yes (Zajonc)
Cognitive appraisal is not required to experience an emotion
‘Cognitive appraisal is an integral feature of all emotional states’
Lazarus’ appraisal theory
Cognitive appraisal- the interpretation of a situation that helps determine the nature and intensity of the emotional response
Speisman, Lazarus, Mordkoff & Davidson (1964)
Ps show anxiety evoking films, stress/arousal measured during viewing
Showed that manipulating appraisals influences an emotional experience
Cognitive appraisal theory
Primary appraisal -> secondary appraisal -> reappraisal
Appraisals
Evaluation of a situation relevant to our goals, concerns & well being
Primary appraisal
Identify the stimulus/situation as to whether there is a threat to personal well-being
Significance/ meaning of the event to the individual
eg.Motivational relevance
Motivational congruence
Secondary apraisasal
Determine which personal resources are available to cope with a situation
eg. Accountability, problem-focused coping potential, emotion-focused coping potential, future expectancy
Reappraisals
Monitor 1º and 2º appraisals and modify if necessary
Attention and emotion
Prior to coding information into memory, we need to attend stimuli
Evidence suggests that attentive processes are biased by emotion
Cognitive biases
Attention bias-selective attention to emotionally related stimuli present at the same time as neutral ones
Interpretative bias- a tendency to interperet a situation or ambiguous situation in a negative way
Stroop tasks, normal vs emotional
Normal troop- shown names of colours in congruent or incongruent ink and asked to report colour of in, slower on incongruent trials
Emotional stoop-shown both emotional and neutral words in different coloured inks- asked to name ink colour
Stroop tasks- anxiety related attentional bias
Examine attention to word meanings and measures trait anxiety
The emotional meaning of a word captures attention away from the revilement stimulus (greater effect on high anxious individuals)
Dot-probe attentional task
Examines early allocation of attention
Emotional threat and neutral information presented side by side
Location of threat controlled
Examine speed of responses when dot occupies location of each type of stimulus
Results: shows positive bias but reverse is true for anxious patients, slower for neutral words
Anxious patients allocate attention to threat words- attentional bias for threat
Eysenck, MacLeod & Mathews (1987)
Interpretive bias
Presented homophones auditorialy, Ps write down words
High anxiety Ps write down more threatening word
Critiques: maybe both options were available but high anxiety Ps chose to write down the negative one
Richards & French (1992)
Used homographs ( dual meaning, same spelling) in priming lexical der ecision task
If prime and target are related in meaning then responses are fast
Results: greater priming effect for target words related;ated to negative interpretation of the prime for high anxiety Ps so interpretive bias shown
Basic visual search paradigm
Search display has target and distractors
The properties of the target or distractors is varies
If reaction times for a target don’t vary as a function of a set size then the the search is assumed to be …
parrallel
Target detection is more difficult when …
target features are shared with the distractors
Detection of threatening faces Öhman (1999)
Suggests evolutionary adaptation to detect threat quickly and automatically
Face in a crowd effect
Suggests anger superiority effect
Takes less time to detect an angry face in happy distractors than a happy face in angry distractors
