Emotion, Motivation, and Attention

Question 1

Describe four evolutionarily conserved basic emotional/motivational systems

Answer 1

1. circuits for responding to major life-challenging events
2. system to organize behavioural responses
3. information is exchanged with fronto-parietal systems important for high-order conscious cognition
4. sensitivities of relevant sensory systems are changed

Question 2

What are Blue Ribbon Grade A systems?

Answer 2

Basic affect programs for fear, anger, seeking, and sorrow

Question 3

What is the seeking system for?

Answer 3

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!

Question 4

What is the fear system for?

Answer 4

• linked to emotional feelings of anxiety, alarm, foreboding
• painful situations, threat of destruction
• high stimulation: animals run away
• weak stimulation: freeze
• action tendency: avoid!

Question 5

What is the rage system for?

Answer 5

• linked to feelings of hate, anger, and indignation
• restraining or irritation of body surface; frustration
• action tendency: approach!

Question 6

What is the panic system for?

Answer 6

• triggered by social loss, feelings of separation distress, loneliness, grief
• ensures that parents care for offspring
• action tendency: withdraw/approach

Question 7

Name two important brain structures in motivating attention.

Answer 7

Amygdala
Basal ganglia

Question 8

How does experience with emotion guide learning and attention and memory?

Answer 8

Otherwise neutral objects and events become imbued with emotional meaning through classical conditioning

Question 9

How does the amygdala modulate the visual cortex?

Answer 9

Visual cortex activity is greater for emotionally arousing images than less. The amygdala has links to all areas of the ventral visual stream.

Question 10

What is attentional bias?

Answer 10

Emotionally or motivationally relevant information captures attention more readily than neutral information

Question 11

Emotionally salient

Answer 11

Pops out because of emotional relevance or meaning (universally relevant to all people)

Question 12

What is the role of the amygdala in emotional attention?

Answer 12

It influences selective attention for emotional relevance (but not perceptual salience)

It tunes attention to relevant input based on experience

Question 13

What is attentional blink?

Answer 13

Inability to see the second of two target stimuli (when it comes too fast after the first)

Question 14

What is (AB) emotional sparing?

Answer 14

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

Question 15

What happens biologically in the presence of a strong threat?

Answer 15

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)

Question 16

Is the amygdala more sensitive to threat or reward?

Answer 16

Threat

Question 17

What happens after loss of amygdala?

Answer 17

Impaired attention to what is emotionally relevant; ie, emotionally biased attention is impaired

Question 18

What does the basic emotions theory state?

Answer 18

We have emotion systems that are discrete (from each other) and universal across human cultures

Question 19

What do other emotion theories use to define emotions?

Answer 19

• relation to good or bad
• approach or avoidance
• degree of autonomic system arousal

Question 20

How did Pankseep influence emotion theory?

Answer 20

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

Question 21

What evidence is there that emotions exist in other species?

Answer 21

The affective powers of emotion come from the evolutionarily old and conserved subcortical/brainstem systems

Question 22

How does a limited capacity information processing system selectively process a continuous stream of inputs?

Answer 22

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