Emotion, Motivation, and Attention Flashcards
Describe four evolutionarily conserved basic emotional/motivational systems
- circuits for responding to major life-challenging events
- system to organize behavioural responses
- information is exchanged with fronto-parietal systems important for high-order conscious cognition
- sensitivities of relevant sensory systems are changed
What are Blue Ribbon Grade A systems?
Basic affect programs for fear, anger, seeking, and sorrow
What is the seeking system for?
It is a motivational system (positive incentives)
- linked to emotional feelings of hope, anticipation, desire
- DAS is important here
- curiosity, learning, exploring, anticipation
- activated by many psychostimulants
- action tendency: approach!
What is the fear system for?
- linked to emotional feelings of anxiety, alarm, foreboding
- painful situations, threat of destruction
- high stimulation: animals run away
- weak stimulation: freeze
- action tendency: avoid!
What is the rage system for?
- linked to feelings of hate, anger, and indignation
- restraining or irritation of body surface; frustration
- action tendency: approach!
What is the panic system for?
- triggered by social loss, feelings of separation distress, loneliness, grief
- ensures that parents care for offspring
- action tendency: withdraw/approach
Name two important brain structures in motivating attention.
Amygdala
Basal ganglia
How does experience with emotion guide learning and attention and memory?
Otherwise neutral objects and events become imbued with emotional meaning through classical conditioning
How does the amygdala modulate the visual cortex?
Visual cortex activity is greater for emotionally arousing images than less. The amygdala has links to all areas of the ventral visual stream.
What is attentional bias?
Emotionally or motivationally relevant information captures attention more readily than neutral information
Emotionally salient
Pops out because of emotional relevance or meaning (universally relevant to all people)
What is the role of the amygdala in emotional attention?
It influences selective attention for emotional relevance (but not perceptual salience)
It tunes attention to relevant input based on experience
What is attentional blink?
Inability to see the second of two target stimuli (when it comes too fast after the first)
What is (AB) emotional sparing?
People are more likely to see words related to previous near death experiences; attentional blink is reduced when the second target is high in emotional arousal
What happens biologically in the presence of a strong threat?
Amygdala sends signals to ANS and hypothalamus
ANS activates –> breathing quickens, heart rate increases, blood pressure increases, stress hormones are released
Blood flows away from heart and towards extremeties (preparing for action)
Is the amygdala more sensitive to threat or reward?
Threat
What happens after loss of amygdala?
Impaired attention to what is emotionally relevant; ie, emotionally biased attention is impaired
What does the basic emotions theory state?
We have emotion systems that are discrete (from each other) and universal across human cultures
What do other emotion theories use to define emotions?
- relation to good or bad
- approach or avoidance
- degree of autonomic system arousal
How did Pankseep influence emotion theory?
He claimed that:
- emotions are conserved across species
- non-human animals also have emotions
- emotions can be defined best using their underlying physiological effects (seeking: positive insentives/fear: pain and threat of destruction/panic: social loss/rage: body surface irritation, restraint, frustration)
- neutral objects can become tagged with emotional meaning through classical conditioning –> this causes emotion to guide learning, attention, memory
What evidence is there that emotions exist in other species?
The affective powers of emotion come from the evolutionarily old and conserved subcortical/brainstem systems
How does a limited capacity information processing system selectively process a continuous stream of inputs?
Amygdala tags what is biologically important; this guides attention
Amygdala modulates ventral visual system
Past experience
Selective processing according to relevance to goals
- selective attention is guided by emotional salience of inputs
