Emotion Flashcards
What is emotion?
- A feeling that is experience
- Personal for every person
Manifestation of emotions
- Other people can tell how you feel by your facial expressions
- Important to differentiate between the manifestation of emotion and the experience of your feelings/emotion
Describe how anxiety-like behaviour following long-term opioid abstinence can occur
- The maze the mice were put in had a cross like structure - partly covered and partly uncovered.
- The mouse prefers to be covered rather than exposed.
- Results: Morphine withdrawn animals spent significantly less time and entries in the open arms compared to saline withdrawn animals.
- This shows that prolonged withdrawal from morphine induces anxiety-like behaviour
- Consistent in humans
What are the two theories which define emotion?
James Lange
- We experience emotions in response to physiological changes in our body
Cannon Bard
- We can experience emotions independently of emotional expression
- Emotions are produced when signals reach the thalamus either directly from sensory receptors or by descending cortical input
- No correlation with physiological state
Brain systems responsible for emotion
- Broca’s Limbic Lobe
- > Primitive cortical gyri that form a ring around the brain stem
- > Includes: the parahippocampal gyrus, the cingulate gyrus, the subcallosal gyrus
Where is the limbic system and what is its function?
Areas of the brain forming a ring around corpus callosum: cingulate gyrus, medial surface temporal lobe, hippocampus. The limbic system allows animals to experience and express emotions beyond the stereotyped brain stem behaviours.
What is the Papez circuit?
According to Papez, the emotional colouring occurs in the neocortex.
- Sends signals to the cingulate cortex
- Signals passed via the hippocampus to the hypothalamus where expression of emotion takes place
- There will be activation of the ANS and endocrine system
- Hypothalamus will send signals to the cingulate cortex via the anterior nuclei of the thalamus. Experience of emotion will take place.
Which emotion theory is the papez circuit compatible with?
Both theories
Function of the cingulate cortex
Critical for emotional experience
Function of the hippocampus
Governs behavioural expression of emotion e.g. if an individual has rabies it affects the hippocampus and they become hyperemotional
Function of the anterior thalamus
Responsible for relaying the information from the hypothalamus to the cingulate cortex
Lesions of the anterior thalamus
Leads to spontaneous laughing or crying
Regions of the limbic system
- Cingulate gyrus
- Parahippocampal structures
- Septal nuclei
- Amygdala
- Enthorinal cortex
- Hippocampal complex
- > Dentate gyrus
- > CA1-CA4 subfields
- > subiculum
Function of the limbic system
The limbic system appears to have a role in attaching a behavioural significance and response to a stimulus, especially with respect to its emotional content.
Damage to the limbic system
Leads to profound effects on the emotional responsiveness of the animal