Emotion processing: bottom-up effects of emotions on cognitive processes

Question 1

What is attention?

Answer 1

A set of cognitive functions that select and prioritise information for further processing

Question 2

Why is there a selection of the information in attention?

Answer 2

Because of the limits in our cognitive abilities to process all the information

Question 3

How does the adaptative evolutionary perspective explain why emotional stimuli ‘grab’ our attention?

Answer 3

For survival

• emotional stimuli are likely to filter through the selection process to be processed further, physiologically and cognitively
• to enable us to act accordingly in present and future situations

Question 4

What is the ‘pop-out’ effect of emotional stimuli in visual attention (Öhman, Flykt and Esteves, 2001)?
What marks a robust pop-out effect?

Answer 4

Using artificial threat relevant and irrelevant stimuli:
- participants quicker to detect the fear relevant stimulus from fear irrelevant stimuli (distractors)

• speed reaction times of participants for detecting fear relevant stimuli was unaffected by other task factors
  (e. g. number of distractors, location of target stimuli)
• > robust pop-out effect

Question 5

Are ‘pop-out’ effects restricted to non-human fear threat stimuli?
What does it suggest?

Answer 5

No, they extend to social threat stimuli
- identifying a discrepant angry face from crowd of happy faces

-> Natural tendency to detect and respond to dangerous situations

Question 6

How to measure selective attention bias for threats?

Answer 6

Visual probe task:

• fixation cross in middle of screen, orienting attention
• threat and neutral stimuli appear on left and right of screen

-> response to the probe = measure of where your attention is at a particular time

Question 7

Does the selective attention bias for threats differ across individuals?

Answer 7

Yes
- Inter-individual differences

• Individuals can differ in the extent to which they can disengage from threat stimuli
• They can differ in the type of stimulus that captures their attention

Question 8

What is the attention bias index in a visual probe task?

Answer 8

= difference between congruent and incongruent trials

Question 9

What are congruent and incongruent trials in a visual probe task measuring selective attention bias for threats?

Answer 9

> Congruent trial: probe (arrow) appears in the place of threatening stimulus

> Incongruent trial: probe appears in the place of neutral stimulus

Question 10

What do results show for the selective attention bias of people with mental health problems?

Answer 10

> Heightened attention for threatening stimuli
- particularly stimuli that match with their concerns

> If threat stimulus matches their concerns, they’re quicker at responding on congruent trials, and slower on incongruent trials

-> their attention was very quickly captured and possibly locked in by the presence of threatening stimulus

Question 11

What do studies on attention bias of women with eating disorders show?

Answer 11

> Attention orienting bias towards negative and neutral weight stimuli
- and towards negative and neutral body shape stimuli

> Attention avoidance to positive (healthy) stimuli

Question 12

What are the limitations of the visual probe task in studying attention bias for threats?

Answer 12

1. We don’t know if it shows attention orienting or inability to disengage?
2. Hard to determine when the attention focus shifts from vigilance to avoidance because the image is too distressing

Question 13

What is the solution to the limitations of the visual probe task?

Answer 13

Use eye-tracking
- enables a more continuous measure

-> precise information about time course of attention biases from early to late
AND map out direction of the bias when changing from vigilance to avoidance

Question 14

What does the emotional Stroop task show?

Answer 14

Emotional stimuli not only capture our attention but also disrupt processing of concurrent tasks
- absorb cognitive resources

Question 15

What did the study on patients with anxiety show with the emotional Stroop task?

Answer 15

They’re more affected by the threatening content of the words and are therefore slower at colour-naming threat words

• words that disrupted their attention were dependent of their content and the specific concerns of the patients

Question 16

What are the implications of being hyper vigilant to mild threats?

Answer 16

> Can be maladaptive
- characteristic of people with mental disorders (anxiety, eating disorders, depression)

> Can contribute to psychopathologies

Question 17

What do we see in people with depression regarding positive stimuli?

Answer 17

Their attention is less captured by positive stimuli

vs. people with more optimistic and resilient traits

Question 18

What are the effects of emotion on learning?

Answer 18

> They can disrupt attention processing so we perform worse at a task

> They can enhance learning
- rewards motivate children for learning, employees to perform well

Question 19

What is the evidence on external rewards for motivation?

Answer 19

External rewards can dampen intrinsic motivation

Question 20

How to study how rewards enhance simple learning?

Answer 20

Associative learning tasks
- associating cues through contingency

> Training: associate shapes with high/medium/low monetary rewards

> Test: complete matching task
- for correct match and non-matching judgments: participants gain extra rewards to the value assigned to the shape

Question 21

What do associative learning tasks show for monetary rewards and self associations?

Answer 21

> Monetary rewards: beneficial learning effect for high-reward

> Self associations (shape for self vs. friend vs. stranger):

• clear bias to shapes associated with self
• self associations as salient as monetary rewards

Question 22

Which experiment studied fear conditioning?

What did it show?

Answer 22

‘Little Albert’ study:

• object paired with emotional stimulus
• conditioned stimulus, previously neutral, induced fear response

-> threatening stimuli can facilitate fear conditioning

Question 23

What is the common protocol for fear conditioning?

What are the findings?

Answer 23

Pair geometric shape with electric shock while another geometric shape is not

• > individuals can generalise their fear
• show slightly elevated fear to the conditioned safe stimulus as well

Question 24

What did Lissek and colleagues show in their study on the “generalisation of conditioned fear-potentiated startle in humans” (2008)?
How does it relate to Little Albert?

Answer 24

> Conditioning applies to similar stimuli
- Little Albert generalised his fear of mouse (conditioned stimulus) to other white furry objects

> Fear to conditioned threat stimulus can be resistant to change
- depends partly on the nature of the unconditioned stimulus that generated the fear

> It is suggested that even after a fear extinction process, memory for the conditioned fear is not erased but simply inhibited

Question 25

How does fear conditioning model the development of phobias?

Answer 25

Phobias = incident + association
- fear cues present at the time and seems to predict the outcome

• it’s plausible that the conditioned fear generalises to other cues that were present

Question 26

Which evidence suggest that fear conditioning as a model of the development of phobias is too simplistic?

Answer 26

1. Not everyone who has a phobia can immediately recall a negative event that preceded it
2. Not everyone who has similar accidents subsequently develop phobias

Question 27

How can conditioned fear be acquired?

Answer 27

1. Through direct experience
2. Through vicarious or informational learning
   - transmission of fears, which can occur in the absence of direct contact with fear stimuli

Question 28

What do experiments on the acquisition of conditioned fear through observational learning and social referencing show?

Answer 28

Vicarious learning:
- fear is acquired by observing fearful responses to a previously neutral stimulus/situation

• children model fear on parents’ responses
  e. g. visual Clift experiment

Question 29

What can vicarious learning of conditioned fear explain?

Answer 29

Why many specific fears or phobias have an early age of onset
- children model fear on parents’ responses

Question 30

What do experiments on the acquisition of conditioned fear through informational/instructional transmission show?

Answer 30

> Fear can be transferred verbally

> Fear beliefs are only changed when information was presented as a story verbally (vs. video)

> Fear beliefs only changed if information was presented by an adult (teacher, adult stranger) but not by peers

-> transmission of fear from adults - parents - to children

Question 31

Does everyone develop phobias with fear conditioning?

What does that imply for models of fear conditioning?

Answer 31

Not everyone develops phobias

-> Model of fear conditioning must account for individual differences in how fear is acquired

Question 32

What did the “updated meta-analysis of classical fear conditioning in the anxiety disorders” (Duits, Cath and Lissek, 2015) show?

Answer 32

Those with anxiety conditions differ in:

• how they generalised fears
• how much they resist fear extinction

Question 33

What is the consequence of disturbances in the processes of generalisation and extinction of fear?

Answer 33

Can maintain a state of fear that then affects avoidance behaviours

• > vicious cycle: the more individuals avoid the fear stimuli, the less natural extinction can occur
• > maintaining fear

Question 34

What is the potential consequence of acquiring threatening associations in PTSD?

Answer 34

Cues associated with elements of experiences at point of trauma can provoke powerful sensory images through flashbacks - reliving the original trauma
-> extreme fear and avoidance

• individual differences, also in addiction (reward associations)

Question 35

What are the effects of emotions on memory?

Answer 35

1. Emotional events are better remembered that non-emotional events
   - e.g. patients with amnesia shower no overall recollection of faces, BUT their judgments were consistent with initial descriptions of photographs presented a week before
   - > emotions can impact the outputs of the system
2. Emotions can narrow the focus of attention
   - stress hormones affect memory retention

Question 36

What are flashbulb memories?

Answer 36

Memories of salient events which can be described in great detail

• even for big events in the news (Kennedy’s assassination, Princess Diana’s death, 9/11)
• > who was there, what they were doing, who were they with
• However not always accurate

Question 37

What kind of design protocol is used to measure accuracy of memories?

Answer 37

Interviewing people immediately after event, and again 3 years later
- with some discrepancies between the 2 assessment points

Question 38

Are memories of dramatic events always accurate?

Why?

Answer 38

No
- post-event analysis can be confused with experience

e. g. Ochsner (2000):
- negative pictures more accurately remembered than positive or neutral pictures
- arousing pictures, both negative and positive, are remembered accurately
- of the correctly identified old negative pictures, participants were more likely to endorse ‘remember’ judgements rather than ‘know’ judgments
- > negative pictures appeared more accurately remembered with rich detail

Question 39

How do stress hormones affect memory retention?

Answer 39

Emotional arousal can narrow attention of central event, but not peripheral events

Question 40

What is the ‘weapon focus’ effect?

Answer 40

Participants spend a greater deal of attention on the weapon rather than the face of the offender

Question 41

What is ‘over general autobiographical memory’?

Answer 41

For some individuals stress can cause over generalised memories

Question 42

Which people often present ‘over general autobiographical memory’?

Answer 42

People with psychiatric conditions following a stressful life event

e. g. PTSD, bipolar, major depression
- inter-individual differences between people with such disorders vs. healthy controls

• overgeneralised memory can’t be explained by other factors than extreme stress
  (education, verbal intelligence, general memory differences)

Question 43

What could explain the production of over general memories?

Answer 43

> Structural memory deficit

> Adaptive strategy for managing extreme emotional distress following aversive events

Question 44

What do studies show on children and young people who’ve experienced maltreatment in early life, vs. non-abused or non-neglected participants?

Answer 44

They are less specific in their description of autobiographical memories when responding to positive, negative and neutral cue words

Question 45

How can memories formed under stress present themselves?

Answer 45

Through intrusive involuntary images
- extremely vivid and detailed

• prominent in many mental health conditions
  (e. g. PTSD: reports of visual intrusions of small number of real or imaginary events, than occur be highly distressing and central in maintaining arousal, fears, and other psychopathological features

Question 46

What are the two phenomena of the effect of mood states on memory processes?

Answer 46

1. Mood-congruent memory
   - we remember things similar to mood that we are in
2. Mood-dependent memory
   - material more likely recalled when in same mood than at learning time

Question 47

What is necessary to mood-dependent memory?

Answer 47

Context-dependent learning:

- congruence between mood at learning and at retrieval for maximal effects on memory performance

Question 48

How could memory biases play a role in maintaining depression?

Answer 48

> Mood difficulties will have an impact on memory formation

- people with depression often can recall negative material more frequently

Question 49

What is the criticism against the potential role of memory biases in maintaining depression?

Answer 49

Memory biases could just reflect a response bias:
- e.g. depressed participants remember both positive and negative words equally well, but they choose to select the negative word

Question 50

Which task confirmed the role of memory biases on depression?

Answer 50

Implicit memory task:

• Encoding: rate how much this word applied to you: foolish, clever, peaceful, failure
• Test: complete the word fragments with the missing word as quick as you can
• > Depressed participants are quicker at completing word fragments of negative words
• > Even when response biases are reduced, there still appears to be a memory bias