Emotion and emotion regulation (laboratory) Flashcards
How can we study emotion?
Emotion kan be studied by
- Using animal models
- Lesion studies that already are aquired
- Psychophysiology
- Skin conductans
- Facial emotion - Neuroimaging
* - Using brain imaging to study anatomicaly what happens during certain emotions*
When studying emotions in animals, we basically only use fear since it is an emotion we can see in an animal. We use a model called fear conditioning to study fear in animals, how does this model work?
Fear conditioning (pavlov)
- Observe reaction to mild unconditioned stimulus and observe the unconditioned response.
Foot shock (unconditioned stimulus) → freezing (unconditioned response)
- Pair the unconditioned stimuli with another stimuli to condition the stimuli. When this is done a few times the animal will produce the same response to the new stimuli as it did to the uncondition stimuli, which will make it a conditioned stimuli.
Foot shock + sound → fear respons
Sound → fear respons
By fear conditiong animals and then examining the brain, experimenters were able to identify what parts of the brain is involved in fear conditioning. How is fear conditioned to a stimuli and where does this take place?
Amygdala
The conditioned stimulus enters the lateral amygdala (LA) via the thalamus and sensory cortex (eg auditory)
The unconditions stimulus enteres the LA via the thalamus and the sensory cortex (eg somatosensory)
The information is sent from LA to CeA (central amygdala), which activates other brainregions to induce the fear respons (freezing, blood pressure, hormones)
Studies af emotions in humans are done by psychophysiology. On technique is by recordning facial expressions. Paul ekman developed facial action coding system, using this we can measure action units in term of facial muscle movement that correspont to a certain level of a particular emotion.
What could one of these experiments look like?
Matching facial expressions to emotions
Participants are emotionally provoked by looking at pictures that can induce happiness or fear.
The facial action coding system measure the action units, eg level of facial muscle action on eyes, mouth or jaw.
The activation of a part/set of facial muscles is associated to a specifik emotion. This approach therefor requiers a very trained eye and is very labor intensive.
Recognising femotions with a damaged amygdala
Patients with amygdal damage are unable to recognize fear, and had issues recognizing expression of suprise but can recognize most other emotions. Patients with damage in the amygdala can’t draw fear as an expression.
Both fear and suprise are expressed with the eyes.
People with a specifik phobia are quicker to recognize anger at a lower intensity than people without, which phobia?
Social phobia
To study emotions using Psychophysiology, there were 2 different options:
- Skin conductans
- Facial emotion
We have talked about studying psychophysiology using skin facial emotion by viewing people expressions, but there is a more subjective way to study facial emotion. How?
Facial electromyografi
Measures facial muscles response to stimuli, this is an objective and sensitive way to study emotions using phychophysiology. This machine detects activity in muscles that are not yet visible to the eye.
Eg by measuring the activity of the corrugator (frowning muscle), in response to negativ stimuli. Or the zygomatic muscle (smiling muscle), in response to positive stimuli.
When do we use neuroimaging (fMRI) to study emotions?
When we want to look at which brain regions are correlated with specifik emotional processing.
fMRI measures changes in blood oxygenation that are induced by brain activity.
The amygdala is more involved during none-subjective emotion recognigtion, as indicated by seeing an increased activation in amygdala during the time patients are shown a picture of a person showing happiness or fear for only a second or so. But when patients are shown this picture for a longer time and process the emotion subjectivly there is a decreas in the amygdal activity.
Explain one more experiment that proves that amygdal activity is higher in non-subjectiv emotion.
In the white picture it is more difficult to regoqnize the same fear/happines as in the black picture (even though they are the same but inverted in colour). In the white picture amygdal activity is much higher (when there is no awareness about the recognition of the emotion)
How is psychophysiology (skin conductans) used?
Skin conductans respondans (SCR)
Measures minute arousal by measuring changes in persperation on the hands.
Even in mild arousal we can have change in persperation not visible by us, this is called micro sweating. The salty sweat facilitates the conductance between two electrodes placed on the skin. SCR is therefor an autonimic response and works well with measuring arousal but less with the valence of an emotional experience.
These humans will not react to conditions stimuli (learned fear)
