Emotion and Cognitive Processes Flashcards
Emotion
Emotions involve: -Physiological responses -Overt behaviors -Conscious feelings Function: marshal body’s resources to respond to important situations.
Valence
*is the emotional vividness of an object, person, or word
Emotional valence has been show to affect performance even on the most simple of task such as a serial reaction time task
serial reaction time task: participants on this task respond as rapidly as possible to stimuli typically;
Ekman and Friesnan
indicate that emotions are universal (innate), but appropriate display differs by culture (nurture).
Ekman’s Universal Emotions
Happiness Sadness Anger Fear Disgust Surprise
Arousal
bodily responses that prepare to face threat (fight-or-flight response).
Responses Include:
- Increased blood flow to muscles
- Increased respiration
- Depressed digestion
- Depressed immune function
Bodily Changes by autonomous nervous system (ANS)
- Sympathetic division of ANS becomes active (especially cardiovascular system).
- Increased respiration is needed for high oxygen saturation
How ANS processes of bodily changes
ANS sends signal to adrenal glands, which secrete stress hormones, including:
-Epinephrine (or adrenaline) which…
Quickly increases heart rate, blood pressure, respiration.
- Glucocorticoids (including cortisol)
James Lange Theory
-James-Lange theory of emotion = see the danger, bodily reaction (increased breathing), and then feel fear.
Stimulus → Bodily Response → Feelings of Emotions
Modern Emotional Theory
Modern emotional theory = see the danger, bodily reaction, interpret the danger based on the context, & then you feel fear.
*Look at notes for diagram
Emotions and Encoding of Memory
emotions strengthen explicit memories
Flashbulb Memories
emotional-event memory quickly formed; preserve vivid detail.
- Shocking event has “consequentiality” or personal significance.
- Act like “flash photographs.”
Zajonic and Lazarus
on specific role of emotion in cognition
- Zajonc believed emotions occurred before and were independent of cognition
- Lazarus proposed that cognition was used to understand emotion
Circumplex Model
- used the axes of valence and arousal to interpret emotional state
- This allows for the parsing of emotional responses due to context and assessment of emotional levels
Approach - Withdraw model of cognition
It is a spectrum model
-Some emotions are approach emotions (e.g. happiness)
We approach things that make us happy
-Some emotions require withdraw
Avoiding depressing movies or traumatic new stories
Recovered Memory
are generally thought to be false
Loftus and colleageus created false memories by using plausible childhood events, family support, doctored photos.
- may involve the use of semantic memory and schemas to create a false episodic memory
Learned Helplessness
Learned helplessness is the conditioning to not escape a painful or traumatic stimulus (or situation) even if an means of escape is available and obvious
Extreme Stress and memory
- Extreme stress can disrupt the hippocampus, resulting in an incomplete memory
- Such memories may be vulnerable to distortion.
- Lab research suggests memories recovered during guided imagery or hypnosis can be distorted.
*Further understanding of the brain substrates of false memories may help identify recovered memories.
Papez’s findings on lesions and emotional processing
- Papez (1937) sees that lesions cause emotional impairment; ***Look in notes for more info.
- **” Discovered we have multiple structures processing emotion
Emotional structures known as limit system
- Emotions involve many regions of the brain (limbic system and adjacent areas).
- Amygdala is critical for emotional processing.
Stress and Learning
Low levels of stress can improve memory.
- Mild stress leads to moderate arousal.
-Chronic high stress and arousal can impair encoding and recall.
Stress hormones may overexcite hippocampus.
-Unclear how much stress is too much.
Different people = different breaking points.
Hippocampus and role in emotion
-Area associated with learning
Hypothalamus and role in emotion
fight or flight response
Amygdala and role in emotion
initiate emotion
Chronic stress and too little stress
Chronic stress very terrible for us but having too little stress is bad for us in preformance.
Bc… bad reactions times, make mistakes.
-Chronic stress and how some people handle it better than others: basleine plays a role—> different jobs have different levels of stress.
Yerkes Dodson Law
- Refer to notes for model
- Moderate level of alertness or arousal is the best spot
- Too high levels of stress, too stressed and panicky so emotions playing a larger role, more seen to make false alarms.
- Low levels of stress not as alert, so causes people to make errors, bad at noticing things.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Extreme reaction to very traumatic events
Noted with hyperarousal, avoidance, and emotional numbness
The hippocampus is involved in likelihood of PTSD
*Stress response to abnormal stress mission.. has a traumatizing nature to it…“Overly reactive”
