Emotion lecture 2

Question 1

Why may the results be more confused and overlap in the previously mentioned smiles study?

Answer 1

While the big 6 categories captured the mental models well for western observers, the big 6 was inadequate for east asian observers. Probably because other emotions that are fundamental to east asian observers (e.g shame, pride, guilt) were lacking.

Question 2

Describe two pieces of evidence which further display the difference between eye and mouth reliance in western Caucasians and eastern Asian observers

Answer 2

Fixation patterns during emotion recognition across all big six reveal that western caucasian observers sped much more time looking at the mouth than their asian counterparts.

Also they each are more likely to use different emoticons either focusing on eyes or mouth to convey emotion ( :) :( vs ^_^, T_T )

Question 3

When do these differences in looking at eyes or mouth to recognise emotion arise during development/ adulthood?

Answer 3

Very early even around 9 months

Question 4

What is the other race effect caused by?

Answer 4

Contact frequency; how often you see them

Question 5

How does the other-race effect play into the eye-mouth comparison in emotion recognition?

Answer 5

It shows that cultural differences in face identification are similar to emotion recognition. East Asian observers rely more on the eyes, less on the mouth than Western Caucasian observers in a face recognition task also.

As with emotion recognition, these differences are observer-specific and invariant across East Asian and Western Caucasian faces

Question 6

These studies have so far focused on Asian vs western cultures. Describe a study which examined more remote cultures

Answer 6

Study examined difference in sorting photos of facial expressions into distinct piles by people from the US vs. the Himbaethnic group (remote culture in Namibia with little contact to outsiders and no written language but spoken words for neutral and the Big 5 basic emotions). There was no other instruction apart from sorting them in piles.

The US participants spontaneously label their piles with the big 5 words, those in the other culture often used behavioural words or some other random words.

In a second part of the study, the researchers provided them with the emotion concepts and asked them to sort them according to the emotion concepts. This caused the American piles to be more consistent and the other culture to be more consistent with the American to a lesser extent

Question 7

What two important findings can be drawn as conclusions from this study regarding the sorting of photos?

Answer 7

There is a strong effect of culture if you use the free sorting, ekmen was almost forcing these participants to use emotion categories.

For american participants it really makes a difference whether you provide these labels or not. To see the structure in someone’s mind, it is probably better to use these free sorting systems.

Question 8

How are these studies on emotion limited in the inferences they can make on the universality of emotion?

Answer 8

They solely focus on the facial expression of emotion. However these are not the emotion itself so this does not necessarily mean that there are no universal emotion categories.

Question 9

What other visual stimulus conveying emotion has also been studied quite a lot?

Answer 9

The body, sometimes even more important than the face

Question 10

Describe two studies which investigate how body posture can influence emotional judgment

Answer 10

They had congruent and incongruent facial and body posture expression. Participants had to judge the emotion from the facial expression. They are much better at doing this when the body posture matches the emotion conveyed by the facial expression.

In another study the face from tennis players either winning or losing a point were extracted without the body and either the face, the body or the complete image was shown to participants. Participants had to gauge the emotional valence of these images. Participants were very poor at this task when only shown the face however scored just as well in the body condition as in the whole body condition.

Question 11

What did EEG reveal in the first body posture study

Answer 11

this judgement happens very fast- around 150ms

Question 12

What conclusion can be drawn from the second (tennis) study?

Answer 12

Body postures can trump facial expressions

Question 13

How was it shown further that perceived facial emotion can depend on body posture? (2)

Answer 13

In the tennis study, losing and winning faces and the bodies were also paired either congruently or incongruently and results showed that the perceived facial emotion could depend on body posture.

In a seperate study faces conveying different emotions (pain from getting a piercing, pleasure from orgasm, victory and defeat from tennis and grief from a funeral) were cutout from the images and placed into the images of other scenarios to determine the extent to which facial expressions were diagnostic for valence. It was found that facial expressions across intense emotional situations are nondiagnostic for valence. Perceived facial valence shifted categorically as a function of the body

Question 14

Describe a study which investigated whether there is universal emotion recognition from body movements

Answer 14

Study ran in Cambodian highlands on the isolated Kreung tribe. A dance performer in the tribe was supposed to dance to the each of the five basic emotions according to ekmen. US students then had an 85% success rate of identifying it with fixed labels.

They then had an American actress, displaying each of the big five emotions using dynamic body postures and converted it into point-light displays (bio motion). There was a 53% success rate by kreung tribe from point-light displays observers with fixed labels. With free responses there was still good agreements, except for love and pride.

Question 15

Name two face-selective areas in ventral occipito-temporal cortex and their relevant function

Answer 15

Occipital face area (OFA/IOG): Detection of facial components

Fusiform face area (FFA//FUS): Holistic face processing/ identifying faces

(however not as clear a picture as posited here)

Question 16

Name two body-selective areas in ventral occipito-temporal cortex and their relevant function

Answer 16

Extrastriate body area (EBA): Sensitive to body parts

Fusiform body area (FBA): Sensitive to full bodies

(however not as clear a picture as posited here)

Question 17

Recently there has been a lot of work in the circuits of these face sensitive areas both in macaque monkeys and human recordings. What conclusions have been drawn from this research

Answer 17

There is a proposed hierarchy of processing in face selective brain regions.

(V1-V2)
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||(IOG)---|
||            |
|(pFus)   |
|             |
(mFus)--|
|
AT

Just look at images lol

Question 18

What is the STS involved in?

Answer 18

‘social processing’- Processing dynamic and changeable aspects of faces (emotion, eye gaze, mouth movement, lip reading) biological motion, and a number of other things

Question 19

Describe Haxby’s distributed neural system for face perception

Answer 19

it was a dual stream model that also proposed two systems: a core system for visual analysis and an extended system for further processing with other neural systems.

In the core system it is proposed that the inferior occipital gyri (after early perception of facial features) projects to both the STS for processing changeable aspects of faces- perception of eye gaze, expression and lip movement etc and the lateral fusiform gyrus for invariant aspects of faces- i.e perception of a unique identity. These three areas interact with each other.

The STS then interacts with the intraparietal sulcus for spatially directed attention, the auditory sulcus for prelexical speech perception and the amygdala, insula and limbic system to process emotion. The other stream from the lateral fusiform gyrus interacts with the anterior temporal where personal identity, name and biolographical information is processed. These make up the extended system.

This is supported by research but of course still debated.

Question 20

How is this pathway model associated with the where/ how and what pathway model?

Answer 20

The original author of that model proposed an integrated model in which this forms a third stream, processing the dynamics of social perception: facial and body movement (expressions, eye gaze, bodies etc)

Question 21

This activity in the temporo-parietal junction feed into a module for what function?

Answer 21

Understanding other’s thoughts; the theory of mind

Question 22

Describe a task which measures theory of mind

Answer 22

False beliefs task:
False belief: Someone else holds a mental state (belief) that differs from one’s own belief and from the current state of reality

•In developmental psychology: Object transfer task, e.g. Sally-Anne task (shows sally placing marble in the basket before leaving, Anne transfers it into a box before leaving, sally returns- where will sally look for the marble?)

•Correct answer: “In the basket”
>proof of Theory of Mind

Question 23

Describe a study which utilised this false belief task to measure the neural correlates of theory of mind

Answer 23

A false belief story and a false photograph story were presented as two different conditions and a question was posed asking about what someone believed vs what the developed photograph would show (both require ‘false’ representation). This task was carried out in an fMRI scanner. In line with expectations, the false belief task showed higher activation of the left TPL than those in the false photograph task.

Question 24

Describe a study which utilised patients doing a false belief task as a measurement of theory of mind

Answer 24

Had three patients with lesions to left TPJ do a video based false belief task. Although impaired in language (story based false belief tasks), in video-based false-belief had selective impairment- were not impaired in areas which may confound this: memory control, inhibition control.

Question 25

Describe a study demonstrating the role of the TPJ which did not utilise the false belief task

Answer 25

Participants were tasked to think about another persons thoughts through stories vs appearance and bodily sensations (e.g bodily pain) and fMRI measured brain activity. The results only showed activation of the TPJ only for the thoughts category. This demonstrated that TPJ is specific to thinking about another persons thoughts, i.e as a brain model for attributing mental states.

Question 26

Describe the James-Lange theory of emotion

Answer 26

It focused on the conscious feelings of emotion or ‘feelings’ (something happening in the body.) He (William James) claimed that bodily (visceral, somatic) responses can be sensed by the organism and in turn can cause conscious experiences of the emotion. He furthermore claimed that bodily changes can combine to a virtually infinite number of emotion states (e.g heart rate x blood pressure x sweating x breathing x bladder x voluntary movement.)

“the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and our feeling of the same (bodily) changes as they occur is the emotion.”

Question 27

How was it shown through a study that despite the theiory being counter intuitive, william james actually captured a lot of intuitions in his theory?

Answer 27

Having lay people colour where they feel emotions in their body, people have quite some consistent ideas that vary across emotions.

Question 28

What is another name given for the fear response and what body response is it associated with? To what extent and how did WJ factor this into his theory?

Answer 28

Freeze, fight or flight response; sympathetic nervous system (arousal)- Increased heart rate, Increased blood pressure, Elevated perspiration, Decreased salivation, Increased muscle tone, Rapid breathing, Pupil dilation, Adrenalin and cortisol release.

These were not known at the time of William James’ theory.

Question 29

How is the peripheral nervous system divided? Which is james-lange theory most relevant to?

Answer 29

Somatic nervous system: Motor nerves to somatic muscles and sensory nerves from the major sense organs

•Autonomic nervous system (ANS): Motor nerves to the muscles of the inner organs (viscera), glands and the heart muscle and sensory nerves from viscera and blood vessels

Most relevant to ANS

Question 30

How is the autonomic nervous system further subdivided? What neurotransmitters are associated with each?

Answer 30

Sympathetic and parasympathetic subdivisions of the ANS with opposing actions and different neurotransmitters (norephinephrine vs acetylcholine)

• Sympathetic ANS prepares for action (arousal) by providing glucose and freeze, fight or flight response
• Parasympathetic ANS replenishes the body

Question 31

What was the Cannon-Bard critique of the James-LAnge theory?

Answer 31

30 years later when these biological mechanisms were being discovered, Canon-Bard claimed that the ANS is too slow and unspecific to give rise to conscious emotions as WJ claimed.

Question 32

Elaborate on how lack of specificity was an argument against James Lange theory?

Answer 32

Any stimulus provoking arousal of the sympathetic nervous system leads to similar visceral changes (of which we are mostly unaware.) It is better to think of the sympathetic nervous system as causing uniform fight or flight response rather than conscious experience of emotions.

Question 33

Describe two experimental biological manipulations which demonstrated evidence against JL theory

Answer 33

Sherrington demonstrated that by cutting the vagus nerve (major parasympathetic nerve carrying sensory information from the viscera) does not disrupt emotion expression on a vagotomised dog, and cannon had similar findings on sympathetically isolated cats..

Maranon also showed that injection of adrenaline causes body changes similar to intense emotions but no subjective experience of emotions (except when primed!- Subjects reported feeling “keyed up”, they seemed to feel “as if” they were afraid, sad or happy, but ”without true feeling”)

Question 34

Describe two experimental biological manipulations which demonstrated evidence against JL theory

Answer 34

Sherrington demonstrated that by cutting the vagus nerve (major parasympathetic nerve carrying sensory information from the viscera) does not disrupt emotion expression on a vagotomised dog, and cannon had similar findings on sympathetically isolated cats..

Maranon also showed that injection of adrenaline causes body changes similar to intense emotions but no subjective experience of emotions (except when primed!- Subjects reported feeling “keyed up”, they seemed to feel “as if” they were afraid, sad or happy, but ”without true feeling”)

Question 35

How was the ANS examined in depth to find evidence for JL theory?

Answer 35

Individual factors (16) of ANS arousal were measured during the experience of different emotions. It was found that these measures do not reliably distinguish emotions.

Question 36

Describe Cannon-Bard theory and the research which they presented to support it

Answer 36

They de-corticated (removed the cortices ) of cats :( and when they recovered from their surgery, they demonstrated that the cats demonstrated intense fury whenever being touched anywhere. They called the fury displayed in these sudden unprovoked attacks ‘sham rage’. They used this evidence to posit that the cortex cannot be necessary for emotion expression.

Lesioning just below the thalamus abolished sham rage, therefore they claimed that the diencephalon played a key role in emotion expression (normally inhibited by the cortex.)

Question 37

How did Walter Hess present further evidence for the Canon-Bard theory?

Answer 37

He implanted electrodes stimulating the hypothalamus in cats. This produced “affective defense reaction:” Increased heart rate, alertness and propensity to attack. By stimulating slightly different areas of the subcortex, he could trigger cats to be angry, fearful curious or lethargic. He therefore showed that a simple train of electric impulses can bring about a really coordinated, sophisticated and recognisable emotional response in a cat. He also said that this should not be called sham rage but ‘true rage.’

Question 38

Contrast James-Lange theory and Cannon-Bared theory

Answer 38

JL theory posits that we have a body response to a stimulus which produces the feeling.
•Sensory cortex processes stimulus
•Motor cortex induces body changes
•Feedback from body causes feeling

Cannon Bard theory states that we have subcortical brain activity in response to a stimulus which leads to bother the feeling and the bodily response.
•Thalamus functions as “emotion hub”
•Hypothalamus induces body changes
•Cortex simultaneously causes feelings