Fear, Emotion, and Stress Flashcards
What are the distinctions between cognition and emotion?
The difference between reasoning or thinking and sensing or perceiving
Emotion/affect:
- Intrinsically valenced (positively or negatively valued) e.g. love/hate; happy/sad
- Greater subcortical involvement
- Can survive brain damage that severely impairs cognition
- More powerful + easier in the young
- Generate spontaneous, transcultural facial, bodily + prosodic expression
Cognition:
- More cortical
- Cognitive maturity dampens emotion/affect
What are the 6 basic emotions according to the universality of facial expressions and their meaning across cultures?
- Anger
- Happiness
- Disgust
- Sadness
- Surprise
- Fear
Evolved response: - Cross cultural + cross species
Barrett et al., 2019 -> Data suggests we are good at determining emotion in others but there is less strong evidence correlating individuals’ emotions with their facial responses. But it supports the universality of human emotion
What was Darwin’s theory about the evolution of emotional expression and what is his principle of antithesis?
- Expressions of emotion evolve from behaviours that indicate what an animal is likely to do next
- If emotional signals are beneficial, they will evolve to more effectively communicate
- Opposite messages are often signaled by opposite movements - “principle of antithesis”
What is an example of a survival advantage that expression of emotion can bring?
Threat displays, for example, are beneficial - intimidate victims without the costs + risks for fighting
- Displays are honest signals
e.g. aggressive posture of dogs -> ears forward, back up, hair up, tail up
submissive posture -> ears back, back down, hair down, tail down
How do the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems jointly achieve balance in the body’s physiological regulation?
Sympathetic system:
- Increases arousal
- “Fight or Flight”
Parasympathetic system:
- Decreases arousal
- “Rest + Digest”
Describe the sequence of events during an emotional experience according to folk psychology
Event perceived -> we experience emotion -> physiological reactions
Describe the sequence of events during an emotional experience according to James-Lange theory
Event perceived -> Physiological reactions -> we experience emotion
Evidence: loss of peripheral feedback (spinal injury) reduces felt emotional intensity
Issues:
- Experienced arousal can outlast physiological changes
- Feelings can have faster time-course than associated changes
- Physiological changes in intense emotion (e.g. fight-flight) too undifferentiated to be sole basis of experienced diversity of feelings (e.g. anger, fear, surprise)
Describe the sequence of events during an emotional experience according to Cannon-Baird theory
Event perceived -> physiological reactions + we experience emotion
- No connection between physiological arousal + experience of emotion
Experience of emotion is independent of physiological response
Evidence:
- Removal of sympathetic NS from a cat
- Eliminated physiological arousal
-Cat still showed emotion (anger, fear, etc.)
How did Schachter + Singer (1962) renew support for the James-Lange argument and what did they contribute to the theory of emotion?
- Injected ppts with epinephrine (adrenaline)
- Group A forewarned about how body would react, Group B not
- Group A reported no emotional experience (feeling)
- Some in group B experienced feelings when their body responded to injection
- The specific emotion experienced by Group B people could be influenced by a confederates’s behaviour (e.g. angry or elated)
Linked physiological system as something that can cause an emotional arousal
Operative in emotional experience + behaviour are:
- the stimulus, the immediate circumstance, state of mind, previous experience/knowledge, and the perceived bodily responses to the stimulus
- Cognition uses these to label the specific emotion
Describe the current thinking of emotional experience
- Most immediate response is an unconscious appraisal of valence (harm/benefit)
- This appraisal generates action tendencies or biases (pre-cognitive, pre-somatic)
- The body response
- Cognition + specific conscious experience modulate the physiological + behavioural response
Which circuit is named after Papez and which areas were added by MacLean to form the limbic system?
- Coordinated action of the hippocampus, hypothalamus, anterior thalamus and cingulate gyrus
- Amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex were added by MacLean to form the limbic system
How did the Morris et al (1996) experiment help identify the amygdala’s role in perceiving fear/danger?
- ppts see a series of faces over a period of time, some of these series shift from happy to fearful expression
- Viewing increasingly fearful faces causes increased blood flow in the amygdala
What is the overall design of the autonomic nervous system?
- Paraventricular nucleus ->
controls anterior and posterior pituitary gland function + directly innervates parasympathetic and sympathetic neurons in the medulla and spinal cord - Hypothalamus has regulatory function + begins our stress + fight/flight response
ANS is separated into:
Sympathetic system -> increases arousal (‘fight/flight’
Parasympathetic system -> decreases arousal, calms us down (‘rest + digest)
What are the 3 stages of the GAS and the associated reactions?
Alarm reaction:
- “Fight or flight response”
Resistance:
- Physiological responses begin to normalise
- Remains on alert until resolution of stressor
- If stressor is not resolved, physiological response remains elevated
Exhaustion:
- Depletes physical, emotional and mental resources
- Weakens immunity
What is the concept of allostatic load?
McEwan (1998)
Homeostasis: Maintenance in physiological stability (like thermostat)
-> hypothalamus regulates the internal environment of human body
Allostasis: The ability to achieve stability through change
-> we mobilise bodily resources to meet the external stressor, but when we encounter an external stressor, there is a physiological cost
-> depending on how intense the stressor is, more resources will be needed
Effect: The wear and tear from chronic overactivity or underactivity
How is the hypothalamus a key structure in body’s response to stress?
The HPA (hypothalamus pituitary adrenal) axis
- Hypothalamus is involved in the release of cortisol (stress hormone) and in the release of adrenaline into the bloodstream
-> these chemicals are the key to the fight or flight response
How can different types of stress affect immune functioning?
Segerstrom & Millar, 2004
-Chronic stress is bad for immune system -> decreases natural + specific immune functioning
- Acute time limited stressors can increase our natural immune functioning but decreases our specific immune functioning
Fear conditioning: What does a classical conditioning paradigm involve?
Training:
- Animal placed in cage
- A sound comes on - the conditioned stimulus (CS)
- A mild shock to feet - the unconditioned stimulus (US)
After a few pairings:
- When sound comes on, the conditioned response (CR) includes
-Freezing + crouching
-Fur stands on end, BP + HR rise
-Stress hormones released into bloodstream
The response pattern indicates activation of natural danger management system
- Occurs quickly and is very resilient
- Repeated presentation of sound (CS) without shock (US) can produce extinction
- Spontaneous recovery of learning after extinction was carried out (Pavlov)
- Induced recovery by return to context (Bouton)
- Reinstatement by application of stress
- Extinction doesn’t erase the memory but reduced the chance or severity of the CR (fear)
Fear conditioning: How did LeDoux’s lesioning studies identify the two pathways by which emotional learning occurs?
Thalamic pathway + cortical pathway
- Firstly lesioned the cortex (animal no longer had access to cortex) -> left fear conditioning unaffected
-> cortex is not involved with fear response
-Then lesioned the thalamus -> this eliminated fear conditioning
-So thalamus is important for fear conditioning
- Lesioned amygdala in another group of rats with an intact thalamus -> this eliminated fear conditioning
-> thalamus was sending signals to amygdala
Which structures are important for discrimination and context conditioning?
Cortex is important for discrimination:
- Animal gets two similar tones, one paired with shock, the other not
- After learning, cortex is lesioned
- Animal responds to both tones as though they predict shock -> can’t discriminate
Hippocampus is important for context conditioning:
- Simply returning to the context (without CS) can invoke CR
- Hippocampus lesioning can eliminate context conditioning, but leave fear conditioning intact
