Emotions

Question 1

What is an emotion?

Answer 1

Feeling is the subjective experience of the emotion, not the emotion itself.

Similar physiological responses can be associated with different emotions – e.g. heart racing – excitement, anger, anxiety

Behavioural responses can be used to mask true emotions.

Question 2

principles of basic emotions

Answer 2

– Unique characteristics
– Developed through evolution
– Reflected in facial expressions

Question 3

principles of complex emotions

Answer 3

– Combinations of basic emotions

– May be socially or culturally learned

Question 4

why are basic emotions Entities independent of our perception

Answer 4

basic emotions are real things, they’re not just the product of how we perceive something, in other words, we could get a physiological response and interpret it in different ways – the idea is that this wouldn’t constitute a basic emotion

Question 5

exampleof complex emotion

Answer 5

Love activates a distributed brain network involving many other functions – dopaminergic midbrain reward but also cortical regions. – suggests it’s a composite of many emotions

Question 6

what did ekman do

Answer 6

• Studied facial expressions as a window on emotion

* Facial expressions used to indicate a particular emotion are the same across cultures

Question 7

what are the basic emotions

Answer 7

– Anger, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness and surprise.

Question 8

who added onto the basic emotions

Answer 8

Tracy & Matsumoto (2008)

Question 9

what did Tracy & Matsumoto (2008) do

Answer 9

Studied athletes at 2004 olympic and paralympic games.
Examined nonverbal expressions of pride and shame at winning or losing.
Found that expressions of these emotions were culturally very similar even in congenitally blind contestants.
Argued that pride and shame are also basic emotions on the basis that their body language cannot have been learned culturally.

Question 10

what is James-Lange theory

Answer 10

William James thought that the perception (the feeling) of emotion came after the physiological response.
In other words, you only feel scared after your body has started running away.
You could not have an emotion without first having a bodily reaction.

Question 11

what is cannon-bard theory

Answer 11

Argued that James must be wrong because physiological signals can be interpreted in different ways – e.g sweating = anxiety or excitement
Moreover, neuronal and hormonal feedback processes are too slow to account for the speed with which emotions experienced

Question 12

what was LeDoux’s theory on Two emotion systems

Answer 12

• One system for emotional responses
• Another system for generating the conscious feeling of emotion
• First system evolved to produce fast, automatic responses
• Second system produces feelings, which are learned by experience
• Joseph Ledoux has come up with probably the most widely accepted theory of emotion.
The amygdala is key to this

Question 13

what does the amygdala look like

Answer 13

Two small almond shaped structures in the medial temporal lobe on the end of the hippocampus

Question 14

what did Feinstein et al. (2013) do

Answer 14

Looked at Ps with bilateral amygdala lesions.

Consistent with earlier suggestions that panic is a false biological alarm, the affective response to CO2 may be part of a protective system triggered by suffocation and acute metabolic distress.
Researchers gave patients with bilateral amygala damage co2 inhalation
Found they actually had an elevated panic response

Question 15

what did Feinstein et al. (2013) find

Answer 15

Compared CO2 response in patients and controls
All the amygdala patients had panic attacks, only 25% of healthy controls did.
Also tested subjective response to CO2.
Amygdala patients and controls who did have panic attacks had similar levels of subjective panic.

• Intact fearful response to carbon dioxide inhalation
• Suggests amygdala role in fear is not in the experience of fear per se, but in the translational of external threats into a fearful response

Question 16

what do connections to amydala suggest

Answer 16

Connections to the MTL suggest a role in memory
Connections to the striatum suggest a role in learning
Connections to PFC suggest a role in attention/working memory.

Question 17

what is extinction

Answer 17

In extinction, you just get rid of the association of the light with the footshock.
So you just present the tone alone repeatedly, and after a while the mouse unlearns the association

Question 18

what did Quirk et al (1995) do/find

Answer 18

measured firing rates in response to a conditioned stimulus

after training amygdala increase their firing especially in the very early phase after tone delivery. The plasticity goes away after extinction

Question 19

Role of the amygdala in fear conditioning

Answer 19

• Amygdala lesions block fear learning
• Rats with amygdala lesions do not learn to associate the light (CS) with the shock (US) to produce a startle response (CR)

Question 20

what did LeDoux (1996) do in fear conditioning

Answer 20

Information about a threatening stimulus reaches the amygdala via two pathways – the high road and low road.
Information takes about 15ms to go down the low road and is fairly crude
Information takes about 300 ms to travel down the high road and has a much higher level of detail – the sensory properties of the stimulus are analysed in the visual cortex before travelling to the amygdala

Question 21

who studied Double dissociation of conditioning and declarative knowledge relative to the amygdala and hippocampus

Answer 21

• Bechara et al. (1995)

Question 22

what did • Bechara et al. (1995) do

Answer 22

• Bechara et al. (1995) studied 3 patients – one with amygdala lesion, one with hippocampal lesion, one with damage to both structures
• Conditioned Stimulus (CS): coloured slide/tone
• Unconditioned Stimulus (US): Boat horn
• Measured Skin Conductance Response (SCR)
• Also asked patients to report explicit knowledge of which CS predicted the US

Question 23

wht did Bechara et al. (1995) find

Answer 23

Patient with amygdala damage showed impaired SCR to the conditioned stimulus but intact factual learning

Patient with hippocampus damage showed normal SCR to the conditioned stimulus but impaired factual learning

Patients with both amygdala and hippocampus damage showed impaired SCR to conditioned stimulus and impaired factual learning.

Question 24

what did Phelps et al. (2001) do

Answer 24

• Instructed fear paradigm with fMRI
• Participants told one stimulus (blue square) predicts a shock whilst another stimulus (yellow square) predicts safety (no shock)
• No actual shocks administered

Question 25

what did Phelps et al. (2001) find

Answer 25

• Amygdala plays role in expression of fear response, regardless of how it was learnt

Activation in amygdala in the first half of threat vs safe trials, even though no shock delivered
Correlation between amygdala activation and SCR response (positive)
Amygdala plays a role in the expression of the fear response, regardless of how it is learnt.

Question 26

what did Cahill et al (1996) find/do

Answer 26

Showed patients emotional and neutral films and recorded glucose metabolism in the amygdala – proxy for activation
Recall for emotional films is superior to neutral films
Activation in the amygdala at the time of viewing correlated with emotional film recall but not neutral film recall
Higher the amygdala activation was at the time of which the subjects watched the film, the more emotional information they subsequently recalled. Shows a role in emotional processing

Question 27

Role of amygdala in learning and memory – summary

Answer 27

• Amygdala necessary for learning association between stimuli and threat
• Amygdala necessary for implicit learning but can also play a role in explicit learning under some conditions
• Amygdala acts to modulate hippocampal consolidation for arousing emotional events

Question 28

what is attentional blink

Answer 28

subjects show reduced attention for a second target when it occurs very soon after a first target

Question 29

what did Anderson et al. (1995) do

Answer 29

Anderson showed that attentional blink effect was modulated by the emotional content of the targets.
They used emotional words as the second target and asked subjects to identify the two green words.
Found AB was reduced when the 2nd target was an emotional word

Question 30

what did Morris et al 1998 do

Answer 30

Can also occur via transient changes in sensory cortical tuning.
Morris measured brain responses to emotional faces.

Question 31

what did Morris et al 1998 find

Answer 31

Brain areas in which activation correlated with amygdala activation during viewing of fearful faces
Correlation between amygdala and visual cortex activation during viewing of faces

Found that activation in visual cortex was driven by activation in the amygdala but only during viewing of fearful faces.
Suggests amygdala can affect attention via transient changes in sensory cortical tuning.

Question 32

whaat is the insualr cortex

Answer 32

bit of cortex deep inside the temporal lobe

Question 33

what is interoception

Answer 33

insula plays a key role in awareness of bodily states

Question 34

what did Critchley et al. (2004) do

Answer 34

Subjects were presented with tones that were either matched to their heartbeat or occurred shortly afterwards (tones were triggered by the measured pulse)
In the attend to heart condition they had to decide whether the tones occurred simultaneously with the heartbeat or not.
In the attend to note condition they had to decide whether a note of different frequency had been presented in the stream.
Thus, two tasks – one involving interoceptive awareness and one involving exteroceptive awareness

Question 35

what did Critchley et al. (2004) find

Answer 35

Greater activation in insula during attention to heartbeat trials than attention to note trials

Activation in insula correlated with

a) Trait anxiety
b) Performance on heartbeat task
- Suggests key role for insula in representing subjective feeling states (interoceptive awareness)