Emotion Flashcards
What are the 3 components of emotional responses?
behavioural, hormonal and autonomic
what is a behavioural response to an emotion?
Muscle movements appropriate for the situation
what does a autonomic response to an emotion do?
Facilitate behaviours by providing quick mobilization of
energy for movement
what does a hormonal response to an emotion do?
Reinforce autonomic responses via brain mechanisms
What are the 3 nuclei in the amygdala and their roles?
Lateral Nucleus (LA): – MAIN INPUT NUCLEUS
– LA also sends internal and some external projections
Basal Nucleus (B)
– Sends internal and limited external projections
Central Nucleus (CE): – MAIN OUTPUT NUCLEUS
– Sends projections to various brain regions
what does damage to the central nucleus in the amygdala do to behaviour in animals
they show less fear and act more tamely
Which nucleus in the amygdala is responsible for classical fear conditioning?
lateral nucleus
Neurons in the LA communicate with the Central Nucleus
CN communicates with the regions that are responsible for the behavioural, autonomic and hormonal components
of the conditioned emotional response
what part of the brain is responsible for inhibiting fear responses?
ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)
What does stimulating the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) do to fear responses?
inhibits conditioned emotional responses
What is the James-Lange theory of emotion?
Stimuli elicit physiological responses and behaviours.
Feedback from the organs and muscles involved organises how we feel emotion (the greater the physiological response, the greater the emotion)
When looking at veterans with spinal injuries, what did Hohman (1966) find?
Decreased experiences of feeling anger, sexual excitement, fear and ‘overall feelings’. The more extensive the disruption, the greater the decrease in emotional feelings. Data supports* the view that disruption of the autonomic
nervous system causes changes in experienced emotional feelings
What did Cannon (1929) find when he severed the nerves in the ANS in cats (sympathetic nerves) in relation to their emotions?
- Cat was not able to experience somatic signals
- Cat was able to demonstrate anger, fear, pleasure
What is the Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotion?
Stimuli cause sub-cortical activity in the thalamus which then causes both the physiological response and the emotion
What us the Schachter-Singer theory of emotion?
suggests that emotional experiences are based on two factors
(1) physiological arousal
(2) cognitive label.
One of the first theories to bring in a cognitive component, e.g., cognitive appraisal, setting the direction for many future models of emotion
Findings of the study that put people in different irritating situations an with/without norepinephrine to see how they felt
Participants interprets physical sensations either as emotional arousal and joins in with euphoric or angry behaviours, OR interprets them as side effects and does not engage
CONCLUSION: Emotions are the result of the interaction between physiological arousal and cognitive interpretation.
What are the 3 core stags of emotion regulation?
- Activation of a goal
- Engagement of processes responsible for altering the emotion trajectory
- Impact on emotion dynamics
Draw the process model of emotion regulation
Look at lecture 6
A meta analysis of emotion regulation in the brain found which 2 areas are important in emotion regulation?
Amygdala & Prefrontal cortex
d: cognitive reappraisal
Strategy to reduce levels of negative emotion experience
What do people with anxiety show in brain activity with mood regulation networkd?
- recruited regulatory network less than participants without mood/anxiety conditions
- increased activation in areas associated with emotional experience and areas that help compensate for emotions
- problems in regulating the downregulation of negative emotions and downregulation and upregulation of positive emotions
Does CBT or SSRIs decrease activity of the amygdala for those with anxiety/depression?
both
How does CBT help anxiety/depression?
helps attention and awareness of emotional state
How do SSRIs help depression/anxiety?
affect the frontal cortex and amygdala, stopping initial emotional response
ow does the process model of emotion approach emotional regulation?
treats each step in the emotion generative process as a potential target for emotion regulation
d: emotional awareness
The ability to identify your own and other people’s emotions
d: emotional contagion
fast automatic responses to emotional expressions in another person - the precursor to affective empathy
d: empathy
feeling and experiencing what another person is feeling
d: affective empathy
Feeling what another person is feeling through recognition, being sensitive and having an appropriate affective response
d: cognitive empathy
Recognizing and understanding that another person is feeling something different to what you are feeling
d: parallel responses to emotion
where the observer shares the target’s emotions/feelings
d: reactive responses to emotion
where we have our own, independent reaction to another’s emotions
Difference between parallel and reactive responses to emotion
Parallel empathy refers to mere replication of another’s affective state, whereas reactive empathy exhibits greater cognitive awareness and may lead to incongruent emotional responses
d: sympathy
the awareness and sensitivity to others emotions without feeling the same thing as them
Which areas of the brain are responsible for what types of empathy?
cognitive/effective empathy - ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) supramarginal gyrus and anterior dorsal medial frontal gyrus
emotional/parallel/affective empathy - inferior frontal gyrus or posterior dorsal medial frontal gyrus
d: prosocial motivation
The intention to respond compassionately to another person’s distress
what are the sex differences in empathy?
Significant sex differences for all components of affective empathy, small differences between sexes evident in cognitive empathy. Women showed greater empathy
what differences are there in the congenitally and non-congenitally blind athletes compared to sighted athletes in emotional expression?
very few differences - suggests that emotion expression is innate and does not require learning by imitation.
within speech recognition, are positive/negative emotions universal or cultural?
Negative emotions have vocalisations that can be recognised across cultures, but positive emotions are communicated with culture- specific signals
are facial expressions innate or culture-specific?
Facial expressions of emotion are culture specific, refuting the hypothesis that human emotion is universally represented by the same set of six distinct facial expression signals
What part of the brain helps in emotion recognition in other’s FACES?
right somatosensory cortex
what does imitation have to do with emotional recognition?
When we see a facial expression of an emotion, we unconsciously imagine ourselves making that expression
What is the simulationist hypothesis of emotional recognition?
Emotion recognition involves simulation of emotion that we are viewing
What parts of the brain help with emotion recognition?
left-hemisphere (mainly) of the amygdala and and anterior insula across emotions, but category specific lateralization of the vmPFC
Which sides of the Fusiform Face Area/Occipital Face Area do each sex use for face processing?
right-sided asymmetry of the bioelectrical activity in males and a bilateral (both) or left-sided activity in females in regions such as Fusiform Face Area, Occipital Face Area or
facial expression processing
How does emotion recognition develop with age?
Different emotion recognitions develop at different speeds & vocal emotional recognition takes longer
How does oxytocin affect emotional recognition of those with antisocial personality disorder?
Improvement of the recognition of fearful and happy facial expressions by oxytocin in young adults with ASPD.
Are men better at reading, just visual, just vocal or visual and vocal emotional cues?
Recognition accuracy was significantly higher in the audio- visual than in the auditory or visual modality
How does testosterone influence emotional recognition?
A positive association between testosterone and recognition accuracy
How does cortisol influence emotional recognition?
low cortisol showed better reaction times to emotion and accuracy at recognition
d: Alexithymia
the inability to recognize or describe one’s own emotions.
does alexithymia affect the ability of someone to recognise other’s emotions?
The data seem to support the idea that recognising emotions and feelings of other people relies on the ability to identify and recognise correctly one’s own feelings
How is the input to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex significant in emotional responses/recognition?
- receives information about what is going on in the environment and what is being planned in the rest of the frontal lobe such as:
- Thalamus
- Temporal cortex
- Ventral tegmental area
- Olfactory system
- amygdala
How is the output to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex significant in emotional responses/recognition?
Outputs affect a variety of behaviours/physiological responses, including emotions organised by the amygdala and other areas such as:
* Cingulate cortex
* hippocampal formation
* temporal cortex
* lateral hypothalamus
* amygdala
what happens to behaviour and decision making if there’s damage to the vmPFC?
serious impairments of behavioural control and
decision making, associated with emotional/social personality changes
which area of the brain is used during moral decision making?
vmPFC & temporoparietal junction (TPJ)
How do types of dementia (behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia bvFTD vs Alzheimer’s disease vs control) respond to the train moral dilemma?
The bvFTD participants were more willing to push a man in order to stop a trolley from killing five other people, than
The bvFTD participants showed less conflict when responding to moral dilemmas, whereas the AD and HC groups expressed distress
which area of the brain does behavioural variant
frontotemporal dementia effect?
frontal lobe
