effects of emotion on cognition Flashcards
What is an emotion
Theories / stages of emotional processing, nature vs nurture, categorical vs dimensional models, role of body vs mind.
What abnormalities are here in major depression
increased amygdala to negative emotions
what abnormalities are there in OCD
increased insula to disgust
What was Winkielman et al’s study
For 16milliseconds, they saw an emotional face and then saw a neutral. They had to say if it was a male or female face. They then had to rate their mood after seeing a face.
They wanted to see how the subliminal faces affected their preference of drinks.
what did Winkielman and colleagues find
revealed strong effects of subliminally presented (unconscious) emotional faces on behaviour (consumption, willingness to pay and wanting for more drink), with no effects on subjective mood or on ratings of liking of a drink. This affective priming effect was only present in thirsty participants (i.e. is dependent on relevant motivational state).
what did Bargh find
Many of his findings have failed to replicate in others’ labs leading some to question the data but they are intriguing.
What are the cogntiive biases towards emotional stimuli
- Classic tests from cognitive psychology have been widely used to demonstrate the influence of emotional stimuli on attention, memory and decision-making
- These tests are frequently used in clinical psychology research to assess the role of cognitive biases in the development and maintenance of disorders
- Some are now being adapted to treatments to modify cognitive biases
What is attention
a process by which specific stimuli within the external and internal environment are selected for further processing
What is a detection task
If an individual is prone to attending more to a particular type of stimulus, he / she should detect it faster if it is located amongst distractors
WHat is the visual search task (Gilboa-Schectman et al)
The participant is presented with an array of stimuli, and they must detect a target stimulus within this array as quickly as possible. Selective attention is indexed by the extent to which the stimuli surrounding the target stimulus slow down the speed with which it is detected
People are more likely to detect a negative face than positive when surrounded by neutral faces.
What difficulties are there in a stroop test
Difficulties in interpreting Stroop. Usually taken to reflect “attentional bias” but:
- Disorder-relevant words may induce internal attention (trigger rumination etc.)
- May induce emotional reaction that slows response
- Cognitive avoidance
what is the fast effect in a stroop test
The fast effect is usually interpreted as reflecting fast and automatic allocation of attention to stimuli of high relevance / arousal
what is the slow effect in stroop test
the slow effect might result from a general slowdown after the processing of negative stimuli; this general slowdown might indicate a warning system that screens the environment in the presence of possibly threatening information (McKenna & Sharma, 2004).
what is the dot probe task
• Measure of selective attention indexed by a shorter latency to respond – better measure, less ambiguous
What was found in the dot probe task
• Across the whole task, the spatial location of the emotional cue (upper, lower) and the spatial location of the dot-probe (upper, lower) are balanced
what is the Attention Probe Task (APT; MacLeod et al)
• Participants will be faster to respond to probes appearing in an already attended region.
what is a limitation of APT
that it cannot distinguish between engagement and disengagement biases.
Who modified APT
Grafton et al.,
How did Grafton change APT
Solve this problem by fixing attention in one particular location prior to presenting the stimulus pairs. Cue matching – participants have to attend to the cue in order to be able to respond accurately.
The first probe fixes attention in a particular location. So, we can specifically investigate whether participants are faster to move attention towards the location of the emotional stimulus, or slower to move attention away from this location.
As with original dot-probe, compare RTs for probes presented in the emotional as opposed to neutral location. Control for general differences in shifting speed, compare with same index for positive.
what is attentional bias
- A systematic tendency to attend to a particular type of stimulus over others (e.g. negative / drug-related).
- Suggested to be an underlying process involved in a range of disorders.
what does eye tracking suggest about anxiety
Eye-tracking suggests increased vigilance for threat and slower disengagement (Armstrong & Olatunji, 2012).
what did Peckham find about depression
Meta-analysis (Peckham et al., 2010) suggests a bias and greater ‘lingering’ of attention on sad stimuli.
what was found about eye tracking w depression
Eye-tracking shows maintenance of gaze on sad stimuli and less on positive stimuli (Armstrong & Olatunji, 2012)
what does Emotional stimuli cause
increased functional connectivity (synchronised activity) between amygdala & visual cortex
what did Eimer & Holmes investigate using ERPs
the time course of facial expression processing in human subjects watching photographs of fearful and neutral faces
what did Eimer & Holmes find
- Upright fearful faces elicited a frontocentral positivity within 120 ms after stimulus presentation, which was followed by a broadly distributed sustained positivity beyond 250 ms post-stimulus.
- Emotional expression effects were delayed and attenuated when faces were inverted. In contrast, the face-specific N170 component was completely unaffected by facial expression.
what did Eimer and Holmes conclude
emotional expression analysis (~120 ms) and the structural encoding of faces (~170 ms) are parallel processes. Early emotional ERP modulations may reflect the rapid activation of prefrontal areas involved in the analysis of facial expression.
What does the amygdala do when emotional
The amygdala receives highly processed visual input from inferior temporal areas TEO and TE.
• At the same time, the amygdala projects to several levels of visual processing, including as early as V1, which allows it to influence visual processing according to the valence of the stimulus. Note that the amygdala is also interconnected with, among other regions, the orbitofrontal cortex, another brain structure important for the processing of ‘stimulus significance.’
what are the three stages of processing
encoding, storage, retrieval
What is an example of selective memory/attention
weapon focus effect
what is a flashbulb memory
a highly detailed, exceptionally vivid ‘snapshot’ of the moment and circumstances in which a piece of surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) news was heard, e.g. the assassination of JFK or the 9/11 terrorist attacks
WHat did Hamman find aboit Enhanced memory for positive & negative (vs neutral) scenes associated with amygdala activity during encoding
participants viewed positive, negative and neutral scenes whilst having a PET scan to measure regional cerebral blood flow. Recognition memory for the scenes was tested 4 weeks later. Participants showed enhanced memory for the emotional scenes and the degree of enhancement was positively correlated with amygdala blood flow during encoding of the scenes.
what is mood-congruent memory
the selective encoding or retrieval that occurs while individuals are in a mood state consistent with the affective value of the material
what is a schema
“organised packet of information about the world, events, or people stored in long-term memory.”
how did Kenealy support mood-state-dependent memory
showed that participants were able to free-recall a map route better when they were put in the same mood (triggered by playing the same happy or sad music) at learning and test.
How did Harmer find antidepressants effected memory
After 7 days of antidepressant (SSRI or SNRI) medication, controls showed decreased recognition of negative emotional expressions
They also showed faster reaction times to classify positive versus negative words, and greater immediate free recall of positive words
Antidepressants increase positive bias in attention and memory in healthy controls
what is Attentional bias modification
Patients with anxiety and depression are trained to attend away from negative stimuli. This can lead to a reduction in symptoms.(See meta-analysis in anxiety by Hakamata et al., 2010; recent studies in depression by Browning et al., 2012, Munafo et al., 2012
