Emotion-Cognition. Flashcards
Cognition is influenced by
emotion
Emotion
aids in making adaptive and efficient decisions that lead to survival behaviors
Allows for rapid evaluation of situations in terms of previous experiences and outcomes.
Emotional influence on cognitive has been investigated in a number of domains including
Perception
memory
decision making
_____is a highly interconnected structure that will
Communicate emotional context to a variety of processing
areas in the brain.
and is
Well positioned to act as a central hub in emotional processing and cognition.
AMYGDALA
AMYGDALA receives direct input from the_____ and ______.
hypothalamus and olfactory bulb.
Input into the Amygdala from the hypothalamus and olfactory bulb will….
Direct sensory input for fast evaluation of emotionally
important information.
Modify or guide subsequent decision making along the slower cortical route
AMYGDALA also connects to the _________ and the ______
Medial temporal lobe -important for emotional influence on memory
Medial and orbital frontal
brain regions - Important for the regulation and cognitive evaluation of emotional content.
FEAR LEARNING
neutral conditioned stimulus can elicit fear (an unconditioned response) when reliably paired with a fearful unconditioned stimulus.
Does not occur when amygdala is damaged or deactivated.
AMYGDALA IS WELL POSITIONED TO MEDIATE ____ TYPE OF LEARNING BECAUSE….
FEAR
Convergence of information from large areas of the cortex.
Neurons represent the emotional relationship between CS and US.
Information arrives to the amygdala along two pathways.
Low road is directly from the
thalamus to allow for rapid automatic processing
High road is through sensory/cortical regions that allows cognitive mechanisms to influence amygdala.
High road likely mediates extinction.
TRUE OR FALSE: AMYGDALA CONTRIBUTION IS AUTOMATIC
TRUE
Stimuli with emotional content are processed preferentially over neutral stimuli.
May want to distinguish between automatic processing and slower cortical processing.
Stimuli are masked to isolate influence of emotion from cognitive evaluation of emotional content
Participants do not report being aware of the emotional content
Binocular Rivalry
used to present a face to one eye and a house to the other
Faces are either fearful or neutral
only one of the stimuli is perceived on each trial
AMYGDALA CONTRIBUTION IS AUTOMATIC, PROVEN BY THE FACT THAT
different images presented to each eye.
AND
only one image Is consciously perceived.
Amygdala activity is greater when
fearful things (like faces) are presented - even when participant does not report seeing stimuli, a face (proven with Binocular Rivalry).
EMOTION INFLUENCE ON PERCEPTION
Targets are embedded in rapidly presented word list (RSVP).
The ability to detect the second word is impaired when the two targets are presented close together.
This is presumably an attention problem in which attention is still focused on the first event – attentional blink.
Detection of the second target greatly improves when it is emotionally arousing.
Does not occur in patients with bilateral or left amygdala damage.
EMOTION INFLUENCES ATTENTION
- Emotional items can pop-out of visual displays.
- When searching for a single target among distracters, search time increases with the number of distracts.
- Targets that are unique along the dimensions of color, orientation, movement will pop -out.
- Same time to detect regardless of # of distractors.
- True when an angry face is the target among an array of happy faces.
- Not true for happy among angry.
- Only potentially threatening stimuli pop-out.
- Emotional content has biased your attention toward important stimuli
EMOTION INFLUENCES MEMORY
- McGaugh proposed the memory modulation hypothesis.
- Amygdala enhances memory storage in other parts of the brain following emotional event.
- Direct through neural projections to the medial temporal lobe and frontal cortex (red connections).
- Indirect via hormonal release to the body via Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis.
- The speed of action of these two pathways allows for influence of both encoding and consolidation.
- Memory for emotional events in better under slightly stressful conditions.
• Recall for story details is better for an emotionally arousing portion of a story compared to emotionally
neutral portions.
- Administering an adrenaline blocker (propranolol ) reduces the memory for emotional content.
- Memory for neutral content is unaffected.
- Similar deficits in patients with amygdala damage.
- Stress hormones aid in memory formation and consolidation.
EMOTION INFLUENCES DECISION MAKING
Damasio - somatic marker hypothesis - prior emotional states can bias behavior and decision-making.
Emotions help in determining incentive during decision making and thus aid in selecting from a possibly large number of alternatives.
Ventral Medial Prefrontal cortex links emotional states with event or knowledge. Triggers reactivation of a somatosensory pattern when presented with event.
Represents a qualitative indexing of previous and current events.
Developed a behavioral task to evaluate how emotion can influence decision making.
Applied the same task to patients with lesions to the Ventral Medial Prefrontal Cortex (VMPFC) – a regions of the orbital frontal cortex.
IOWA GAMBLING TASK PROCEDURE
Select cards from 4 decks to make as much money as possible.
Two good and two bad decks.
All give money on each trial but bad decks lose greater amount randomly over 10 trials.
No overt knowledge of contingency
Initially when there is no punishment, the bad deck is attractive because of the size of the reward.
Takes time to realize that the bad deck is actually disadvantageous because large rewards are offset by large punishment.
Skin Conductance Response (SCR) distinguishes good from bad decks early in the task - well before conceptual knowledge and before having a “hunch”.
Behavior is modified early as well.
IOWA GAMBLING TASK RESULTS
Patients with VMPFC lesions were able to gain conceptual knowledge.
Did not generate a SCR.
Continued to choose from the bad deck.
Were unable to use the knowledge they had gained to alter their response pattern.
WHAT IS EMOTION?
mixture of
BEHAVIOR
PHYSIOLOGY
FEELINGS
Sets of physiological responses, action tendencies, and subjective feelings that adaptively engage humans and other animals to react to events of biological and/or individual significance.
Usually generated in response to stimuli
May not be conscious
Are beneficial for survival
Mood - emotion states that continue for a long time
May not have clear trigger
Affect - outward expression of emotion
Temperament - predisposition to experience different emotions.
Different people may react with different emotions in the same situation
What did CHURCHES ET AL., SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE, 2014 do with emotion?
Emoticons, upside down faces, what perceiving emotion with text
MATCH.COM STUDY OF SINGLES showed emoticons correlated to more sex
Basic Emotions
Paul Ekman proposed a set of 6 common and simple emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, surprise.
Associated with specific facial expressions and physiological
expressions.
Innate
Cross cultural
Evolutionarily old
Anger, sadness, happiness, fear, disgust, surprise
Complex emotion
learned emotions that are culturally specific
Found mostly in humans,
Have complex response patterns - may be comprised of combinations of patterns from basic emotions.
Influenced by language and develop later
Jealousy, contempt, shame, envy, greed
Distinction between basic and complex is still debated.
May predict that different brain areas are involved in different emotions.
DIMENSIONAL THEORIES
Emotions occur along a continuum of two or more fundamental features.
Level of each feature determines the specific emotion
Two Important features have been identified
Arousal - the physiological or subject intensity
Valence - the pleasantness or unpleasantness
Imply that emotion are not discrete but depend on intensity of two or more factors.
Arousal
Valence
Arousal - the physiological or subject intensity
Valence - the pleasantness or unpleasantness
Circumplex models
Example of a dimensional theory
Consider arousal and valence on
intersecting axes.
The associated emotions depend on the combination of positive/negative valence and the level (high/low) of arousal.
JAMES-LANGE THEORY
Emotion results from the interpretation of predetermined physiological states in the body.
Bodily reactions are primary and lead to emotions Emotion is the “feeling” of a physiological response. No emotion can occur in the absence of bodily reactions
No specialized neural structures for emotion.
CRITICISMS OF JAMES-LANGE
Not enough unique physiological responses to account for all our emotions
o Increase heart rate, release of adrenaline, widening of pupils associated with fear, anger and excitement.
Hormonal feedback from body to brain is too slow to account for emotions.
Injection of hormones in the blood does not consistently result in a single emotion.
CANNON-BARD THEORY
suggested that emotions
allow mobilization of the autonomic nervous system as in a fight or flight response.
Hypothalamus is central
Simultaneously processed in neocortex (to generate feelings) and periphery (to generate
reactions).
Bodily reaction does not need to occur first, or be unique.
TWO FACTOR THEORY OF EMOTION
Schachter and Singer: misattribution of emotion
Cognition interpretation of arousal states.
Dutton and Aron, 1960’s tested theory on suspension bridge.
LEDOUX’S LOW ROAD/HIGH ROAD
LeDoux combined aspects of the Cannon Bard Model with Appraisal Models.
Proposed a parallel model of emotion processing.
Low Road fast automatic processing of stimulus Hardwired flight or fight response Evolutionarily important
High Road Slower cognitive route for information Deeper processing of emotion processing stimulus or event. Considers experience, context, etc
LIMBIC SYSTEM
a set of structures involved in emotion processing
Continues to be influential
Not all regions are consistently involved in emotion processing
Question about whether:
brain areas are specific for
specific emotions
Brain areas are involved in processing information relevant for emotion but not exclusive to a single emotion or to emotions in general.
Some structures have been associated with specific emotions
Amygdala – fear
Insula – disgust
Anterior cingulate –
sadness
Others are involved more broadly and not restricted to emotion processing.
Hippocampus – memory
Thalamus – general
relay
THEORETICAL DEBATES
Locationist Approach: Different basic emotions are localized to discrete functional regions of the brain.
Constructionist Hypothesis: Emotions are represented by activity across a network of regions but not localized to any single area. Areas are specialized for kinds of processing – not specific emotions.
Lindquist and colleagues performed a meta analysis of Affective Neuroscience literature in 2012 to try to gain consensus across the field.
Meta-analysis in fMRI and PET
Uses Data from a large number of imaging studies Compares area of activation and the kind of task used to looks for areas of
significant overlap across studies.
Performs statistical thresholding to identify areas that were significantly related to a across the entire literature.
COMPARISON OF LOCATIONIST AND CONSTRUCTIONIST APPROACHES TO EMOTIONAL CIRCUITS
Brain
Locationist
Constructionist
Amygdala
Fear responding
Signaling whether exteroceptive sensory information is motivationally salient
A. Insula
Disgust
Awareness of bodily states
Orbital Frontal Cortex Anger
Conflict Resolution/Evaluation of punishment
Cingulate Cortex
Sadness
Regulating emotional states
