Emotional and social neuroscience Flashcards
Ekmans 6 basic emotions
Anger, Fear, Disgust, Surprise, Happiness, Sadness.
Stereotypical emotions that are shown cross cultures and cross species with same facial expressions.
James-Lange theory
The James-Lange theory of emotion states that the physiological response to emotional stimuli precedes the behavioral response and the feeling of the stimulus. According to the theory, the physiological response of crying is what induces a sad feeling experience, whereas other theories propose that the emotional stimuli is what induces a sad feeling experience. James Lange states that without physiological sensations, there would be no emotional experience.
How was the bodily emotion response and the ‘feeling’ dissociated?
It was done with a lesion study, employing patients with lesions in the right somatosensory cortex (rSS) and in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) respectively. Lesions to the rSS interferes with the emotional feeling, and lesions to the vmPFC interferes with the physiological response. Using emotional ratings (feeling) of happy, sad or fearful music, together with skin conductance (physiological), they were able to show a dissociation between the two systems. Thereby, patients were able to have a feeling response without the physiological response, which contradicts the James-Lange theory.
The limbic system in emotion (Papez-circuit)
Contains the following regions hypothesised to be involved in emotion processing:
- Hypothalamus
- Anterior thalamus
- Cingulate Gyrus
- Hippocampus
- Amygdala
- Orbitofrontal cortex
- Some parts of the basal ganglia
However, the theory is outdated, as research has shown that there is not a single neural circuit of emotions, but rather different emotions are processed in separate neural systems.
The Circumplex model
Model of emotions using dimensions to define arousal and valence. All emotions are plotted in the two-dimensional model, with e.g. ‘Delighted’ being positive and high in arousal, and ‘Gloomy’ being negative and low arousal.
Valence and arousal was studied with fMRI, but the results are not clear.
What is the main brain area for fear experience?
Amygdala plays prominent role in fear. Patients with amygdala damage have attenuated fear experience.
Urbach Wiethe disease
Patients suffering from Urbach Wiethe disease have bilateral amygdala damage since childhood. They have selective impairment of fear experience, and are unable to draw fearful facial expressions.
Despite this, they understand the concept of fear, and other emotions are unaffected.
High and low road to fear
Description of two roads from emotional stimuli to the amygdala, proposed by LeDoux.
Low road: triggered by fearful stimuli that doesn’t reach the sensory cortex, as it goes directly from the thalamus to the amygdala. This can trigger fast responses to fearful situations (e.g. a snake in the grass).
High road: stimuli going through the sensory cortex before reaching the amygdala. This is more accurate, but also slower than the low road.
The role of the Insular cortex in emotion.
The insula is involved primarily with interoception, monitoring e.g. body temperature, hunger, thirst and heartbeat. It is the main brain area related to the feeling of disgust.
Main brain area for disgust experience
Insular cortex. Disgust is thought of as an emotion in close connection to the body, and disgust can e.g. be a response to rotten food or generally things that would be bad for you to eat or get close to.
Main brain areas for anger
Left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (part of the limbic system). This area is also involved with processing social situations and social pain. therefore it is unclear whether the fMRI studies highlighting this area is in fact measuring anger. Furthermore, there are ethical issues relating to inducing anger in experimental conditions, which makes it hard to study.
Main brain areas for surprise
Ventral attention network. Temporoparieral junction and ventral frontal cortex. Surprise is thought to be very closely related to the reward network, and can be thought of as a form of prediction error.
Happiness and Sadness
Medial and ventromedial frontal cortex seem to respond differentially during happiness and sadness. These are also closely related to the reward networks.
What does the low specificity of brain regions in emotion studies indicate?
That the emotion system isn’t sparse, with single regions corresponding to single emotions. Maybe the case is different for fear, as e.g. lesion studies show quite high specificity when it comes to the amygdala and fear.
Social neuroscience
is in a nutshell in a nutshell
Regional processing of social stimuli
Different social stimuli is processed in different dedicated processing models. e.g. extrastriate body area, occipital face ares, fusiform face and body areas.
Mirror neuron theory of action understanding
Mirror neurons are neurons if in F5 region of the premotor cortex, that fire both when the monkey grabs a peanut itself, and when the experimenter does it. They are thought to represent the actions of other persons with the same coding systems as when you are doing it yourself. In social cognition, this is thought to be crucial for social learning and action understanding.
Critique:
Only 17% of F5 neurons are mirror neurons. Also it could just be that the animals are imitating the movement in a concealed way. (Haynes is sceptical.)
