Emotion & Cognition Flashcards
What are the 2 things emotion refers to?
Emotion refers to a relatively brief episode of synchronized responses (which can include bodily responses, facial expression, and subjective evaluation) that indicate the evaluation of an internal or external event as significant (Smith & Kosslyn, 2005).
Emotion refers to the range of reactions to events that are limited in time, such as experiencing joy, fear, or sadness in response to hearing some news.
Moods:
Moods are affective states of low intensity but relatively long duration, and sometimes without any apparent cause, such as a spontaneous feeling of gloom or cheerfulness.
Main factors of emotions:
Caused by specific event/stimulus
Brief in duration
More intense
Accompanied by distinct facial expressions
Directed towards a specific object
Main factors of moods:
Cause usually unknown
Last longer than emotions
Less intense
Not necessarily indicated by specific expressions
Not directed to a specific object
Mood induction:
focuses on changing the baseline state reported by the participants on arriving at the laboratory.
Typical means of changing a participant’s mood are:
to show the participant affective film clips (funny or grim and despairing), to play music (upbeat or solemn),
to ask the participant to focus on affective situations, real or imagined, that result in either positive or negative mood states.
The most common laboratory technique used to manipulate emotion is the presentation of…
emotionally evocative stimuli.
Typical stimuli:
pictures of faces with different emotional expressions; pictures of emotional scenes; words that vary in valence and arousal.
(Direct measures) Self-reports:
How do you feel? To what extent do you feel happy/angry/sad?
(Indirect measures):
asking the participant to choose among different options on the assumption that an emotional assessment of the options partly determines the choice.
inhibition or facilitation of a behavior, such as response time or eye movements.
psychophysiology, the study of the relationship between mental states and physiological responses (e.g., sweating, heart rate, pupil dilation).
How does emotion influence memory?
Emotional arousal can enhance recollection.
Arousal is the overall term for the…
bodily changes that occur in emotion, such as changes in heart rate, sweating, and the release of stress hormones in response to a stimulus.
Prolonged stress and extreme arousal can impair …
memory performance.
The effect of arousal and stress on declarative memory can be characterized by an inverted…
U-shaped curve.
Arousal enhances memory performance, but if the arousal response is prolonged or extreme…
memory performance suffers.
Stress-induced memory impairment is related to hormonal changes that occur with…
long-term stress.
a group of stress hormones released by the adrenal gland, can reduce the firing rate of hippocampal neurons, impair memory performance, and, if exposure is long enough, lead to hippocampal atrophy (McEwen & Sapolsky, 1995).
What are they called?
Glucocorticoids
Patients who suffer from stress-inducing disorders, such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, have…
impaired memory and hippocampal atrophy (Bremner, 2002; Nasrallah et al., 1989).
Patients with damage to the amygdala do not show…
arousal-enhanced memory (LaBar & Phelps, 1998).
Amygdala, through arousal, can influence…
hippocampal processing, modulating the consolidation of hippocampal-dependent memories (McGaugh, 2000).
Mood-congruent memory effect:
Increased likelihood to remember negative events when in down mood and positive events when in good mood (Bower, 1981).
Mood creates a bias in responding:
the memory representations for the mood-congruent and mood-incongruent stimuli are equally accessible, but participants are biased to respond to the mood-congruent stimuli (Schwarz & Clore, 1988).
Emotion can also facilitate…
attentional processing.
Flashbulb memories are often recollected with a high sense of confidence and detail, but these recollections may not be completely…
accurate
