Final Exam Crash Course

Question 1

Emotion consists

Answer 1

of neural circuits (that are at least partially dedicated to the processing of emotion),
response systems (some sort of behavioral response),
a feeling state/process that motivates and organizes cognition and action

Question 2

Properties of emotion:

Answer 2

-Adaptive in nature: short in duration→ stimuli come and go very quickly in that environment and you don’t want to be in that state for a very long time, you want to be able to adapt to the situation

Question 3

-Compare emotion to (these below are not emotions):

Answer 3

• Mood: longer-lasting state, trigger/object not easily identifiable, lower in intensity→ think mood disorder. We can identify the source of what triggered the emotion whereas mood is not as readily identifiable.
  
  • emotions are intense and short
• Feeling: subjective experiences of emotion
• Affect: umbrella term for short- and longer-term changes

Question 4

How do we classify different kinds of emotions?

Answer 4

• Basic: even a super isolated society could recognize happy and sad
• Complex: Pride, regret, nostalgia, bittersweetness can be hard to distinguish→ usually a combination of more basic emotions

Question 5

So are complex emotions their own emotion or not (are they a combination of other emotions)?
Two-axis model

Answer 5

•Valence: positive/negative
     •Pleasure or displeasure
     -Happy vs Sad
•Arousal: strength of experience
     •High or low intensity
     -Excitement and anger are high intensity (because they are high arousal so heart rate is a physiological indicator of arousal) vs sadness and tenderness are low intensity

Question 6

What are the 3 main functions of the limbic system?

Answer 6

facilitate memory storage and retrieval,
establish emotional states,
and link the conscious, intellectual functions of the cerebral cortex with the unconscious, autonomic functions of the brain stem.

Question 7

James-Lange:

Answer 7

physiological and behavioral responses precede feeling

Question 8

Cannon-Bard:

Answer 8

physiology and emotional experience are simultaneous, from two different neural pathways

Question 9

Schachter-Singer:

Answer 9

cognitive appraisal is needed to interpret physiology

Study: injected adrenaline

Question 10

LeDoux’s direct v indirect pathway

Answer 10

direct: stimuli enters visual thalamus goes straight to amygdala
indirect: stimuli enters visual thalamus goes to visual cortex then amygdala

Question 11

3 main groups of neurons in the Amygdaloid complex:

Answer 11

• Basolateral nuclei:
• Central and medial nuclei:
• Cortical nucleus:

Question 12

Basolateral nuclei:

Answer 12

inputs to and from a variety of cortical regions

•Influence learning + memory

Question 13

Central and medial nuclei:

Answer 13

connections to hypothalamus + others
•Control of autonomic responses (fight or flight vs rest and digest), hormones (mate hormones)→ stress, something makes us afraid

Question 14

Cortical nucleus:

Answer 14

connections to the hippocampus

•Receives info from the olfactory bulb

Question 15

Suggests role of the amygdala in automatic/bottom-up control of gaze

Answer 15

Recall that S.M. could not identify an expression of fear on a face
•Eye-tracking demonstrated that S.M. wasn’t looking at the eyes, which control participants were doing (we would all look at eyes but not patient S.M.)
•When told to look at the eyes, S.M. could identify fear! (Fear is best characterized by the eyes)

Question 16

Main Neurotransmitter for sympathetic nervous system

Answer 16

Noradrenaline aka norepinephrine

stress fight or flight system

Question 17

Noradrenaline aka norepinephrine does what

Answer 17

Arousal and attention role

•Shut off during REM sleep

Question 18

Acetylcholine does what

Answer 18

Selective attention, motivation, reward

Question 19

Top-down vs. bottom-up attention

Answer 19

• T-D aka goal-driven control: Knowledge, expectations, goals drive allocation of attention
• B-U stimulus-driven control: Sensory input captures attention allocation

Question 20

Loss aversion:

Answer 20

the tendency to weigh
losses more than gains in making
decisions

Question 21

Reappraisal:

Answer 21

reassessing an emotional response or reframing one’s thoughts around a situation,
aiming to change the emotional response (often to reduce negative affect)

Question 22

Cognitive reappraisal typically involves several

Answer 22

prefrontal areas and anterior cingulate cortex

Question 23

A left-hemisphere network involving the ___ is especially critical for language production and comprehension. White matter tracts serve as key structures in the left-hemisphere network.

Answer 23

frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes

Question 24

Prosody

Answer 24

(tone of speech)

The right hemisphere’s role in language

Question 25

Broca’s aphasia

Answer 25

problems with speech production, syntax, and grammar, but otherwise comprehend what is said or written fairly well.
Non-fluent aphasia

Question 26

Wernicke’s aphasia

Answer 26

have severe comprehension deficits but can produce relatively fluid, but often meaningless speech.
fluent aphasia

Question 27

Paraphasia:

Answer 27

errors in producing specific words

Question 28

Semantic paraphasia:

Answer 28

‘barn’ for ‘house’

Wernicke’s

Question 29

Phonemic paraphasia:

Answer 29

‘fable’ for ‘table’

Wernicke’s and Conduction

Question 30

Neologisms

Answer 30

(plausible words not in lexicon): ‘paffle’

Wernicke’s

Question 31

What is the arcuate fasciculus? What is the condition caused by damage to it?

Answer 31

connection between Broca’s and Wernicke’s

Conduction aphasia: impaired repetition

Question 32

Disconnection syndrome:

Answer 32

no direct route between sound image and speech output areas
Sound images (Wernicke’s) cannot be transmitted for production (Broca’s)

Question 33

N400:

Answer 33

Seen with violations of semantic expectancy/unpredicted words
-Semantic: relating to meaning in language or logic
“After pulling the fragrant loaf from the oven, he cut a slice and spread the warm bread with socks.”

Question 34

P600:

Answer 34

Seen with violations with syntactic expectancy
Syntactic: the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language. The set of rules that determines the arrangement of words in a sentence.
“The broker persuaded to sell the stock was…”: ‘persuaded’ is transitive

Question 35

‘Semantic P600’:

Answer 35

Syntactically intact sentences with semantic anomalies
“The hearty meal was devouring…” the syntax is right because the noun was verbing but semantically it doesn’t make any sense because meals don’t devour—> instead of seeing an N400 which we would have expected with semantic violation we are seeing an P600 which indicates syntactic violation

Question 36

Social brain hypothesis:

Answer 36

large brains were evolutionarily advantageous because they help navigate large groups of conspecifics
•A larger neocortex was selected by the evolutionary pressure of group living

Question 37

What brain area is implicated in the following of social norms, and what happens when people have damage to that area?

Answer 37

• Patients with prefrontal damage may show behaviors that are not compliant with norms→ typically patients with prefrontal cortex damage will exhibit some strange behaviors and the strangeness is often what we perceive as going against social norms
• OFC (orbital frontal cortex) damage: integration of emotional information and decision-making→ deficits in following social norms and they can’t realize that something that they’ve done is actually you know against the norm, of the current environment that they’re in.

Question 38

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been found to be involved in

Answer 38

cognitive functions such as executive function, response selection, and working memory.

Question 39

The default mode network (DMN)

Answer 39

More active at rest (at default); deactivated during task-related behavior
Sit there and do nothing
The reason why called the default mode network is that is this is thought to be sort of like the default state that people are in when they’re not focused on a specific task.

Question 40

Theory of Mind

Answer 40

The ability to represent someone else’s mental states and recognize them as potentially different from one’s own
•Often assessed with false belief task (box and marbles)

Question 41

___implicated in Theory of Mind across 3 different tasks

•Slightly different networks for each specific task

Answer 41

Temporoparietal junction (TPJ)

Question 42

False belief task also involves

Answer 42

medial PFC, precuneus

Question 43

three main components of empathy

Answer 43

• Mentalizing: can we understand it?
• Experinece sharing: can we feel it?
• Prosocial concern: how do you act? seeing a homeless person on the street how do u act towards them?

Question 44

Types of Empathy

Answer 44

•Affective empathy: similar to emotional contagion, feeling what others also feel in a situation
•Cognitive empathy: like ToM , but for affective states
•The ability to infer an emotional state of someone else based on observed cues
-tone of voice, posture, facial expression

Question 45

Pain is conceptualized as a three-part process:

Answer 45

• Sensory-discriminative (e.g. S1)
• Affective-motivational (e.g. amygdala)
• Cognitive-evaluative (e.g. insula)

Question 46

What is the reticular activating system? What does it control?

Answer 46

• Arousal, sleep-wake cycles—> Mainly comprised of input from brainstem (medulla and pons)
• 2 pathways:
• Dorsal (acetylcholine): thalamus, modulates cortical excitation
• Ventral (norepinephrine + serotonin): hypothalamus + basal forebrain, sleep and wakefulness

Question 47

How are sleep-wake cycles controlled in the brain? What are two systems that work together to control for this?

Answer 47

Sleep/wake cycles coordinated via the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus
Both circadian and homeostatic mechanisms (e.g. adenosine) implicated

Question 48

•Unresponsive wakefulness state / persistent vegetative state
vs
•Minimally conscious state

Answer 48

• Demonstrates sleep/wake cycles, spontaneous breathing, reflexes, but does not show capacity to interact with others
• Can demonstrate some measurable evidence of awareness, such as responding to yes/no questions