L11: Emotion and Cognition

Question 1

What is emotion?

Answer 1

A subjective, conscious experience characterised by mental states, as well as psychophysiological and biological reactions.

Question 2

What are the 5 components of emotion?

Answer 2

1. Stimulus appraisal
2. Automatic response
3. Action tendency
4. Expression
5. Feeling

Question 3

What is appraisal?

Answer 3

Process that detects and assesses the significance of the environment for the organism’s well-being. Appraisals affect whether we feel emotions and what specific emotions we feel.

Question 4

What can appraisals be caused by?

Answer 4

Deliberate conscious reasoning or automatic activation of memories.

Question 5

Is each emotion associated with a specific autonomic response or pattern of brain activity?

Answer 5

No, but brain imaging shows a fast route for emotional processing, from the stimulus receptors to amygdala, possibly bypassing cerebral cortex.

Question 6

What is the facial feedback hypothesis?

Answer 6

Smiling makes people happier, frowning makes people sadder.

Question 7

Is it true that in order to identify another person’s expression, we have to mimic that expression?

Answer 7

Yes, preventing face movement slows down emotion identification.

Question 8

Is physiological arousal necessary to feel emotions?

Answer 8

Patients with spinal cord injury (ie. sympathetic nervous system cut off) still experience emotions but less heavily. This suggests that bodily response plays a role in emotional processing but less critical than what was thought.

Question 9

Example of a bottom-up process in eliciting emotions?

Answer 9

Unexpected encounter with a threatening stimuli.

Question 10

Example of a top-down process in eliciting emotions?

Answer 10

Suddenly remembering you have an exam that you haven’t prepared for!

Question 11

How does the left and right brain react to bottom-up and top-down process?

Answer 11

Left brain is more reactive to top-down processing, right brain is more reactive to bottom-up processing.

Question 12

Are women better than men at expressing and understanding emotions?

Answer 12

Not clear yet

Question 13

Are young adults better than young children and old adults at perceiving emotions?

Answer 13

Yes

Question 14

What is emotional regulation?

Answer 14

The use of deliberate and effortful processes to override spontaneous emotional responses.

Question 15

What are the 2 types of emotional regulation?

Answer 15

Explicit and implicit.

Question 16

What are the stages of explicit emotional regulation?

Answer 16

1. Situation selection (avoiding situations that make you anxious)
2. Situation modification (getting a friend to accompany you so you’ll be less anxious)
3. Attention deployment (get yourself distracted)
4. Cognitive change (reappraising the situation)
5. Response modulation

Question 17

How does implicit emotional regulation work?

Answer 17

Implicit processes are believed to be evoked automatically by the stimulus itself and can run to completion without monitoring and can happen without insight and awareness. Using a given emotion regulation strategy repeatedly can lead to the development of implicit regulation.

Question 18

What are 3 bad regulation strategies?

Answer 18

1. Rumination (continuous repeated thinking)
2. Self-blame (attributing occurrence of negative events to self)
3. Catastrophising (fearing the worst could happen)

Question 19

What is attentional bias?

Answer 19

Selective allocation of attention towards threatening stimuli.

Question 20

What is the Emotional Stroop task?

Answer 20

Participants are presented with words or images that are emotionally charged, along with neutral words or images. Participants are instructed to name the colour of the ink in which the words are printed. The presence of emotionally salient stimuli can interfere with the participant’s ability to name the ink colour.

Question 21

What is the dot-probe task?

Answer 21

The dot-probe task involves the rapid presentation of pairs of stimuli, typically consisting of one emotionally salient stimulus and one neutral stimulus. After a brief exposure to the pair, a probe appears in the location previously occupied by one of the stimuli. Attentional bias is inferred from differences in reaction times to probes that replace emotionally salient stimuli compared to probes that replace neutral stimuli

Question 22

What is mood congruity?

Answer 22

The finding that learning and
retrieval are better when one’s mood state is congruent with the affective value of the to-be-remembered material.

Question 23

How does the amygdala affect emotional learning and memory?

Answer 23

The more the amygdala is activated
during the learning of emotional
information, the better the long-
term memory for this information

Question 24

Are anxious people more likely to show optimism bias?

Answer 24

No.

Question 25

Are angry people more likely to show optimism bias?

Answer 25

Yes, perhaps
because they feel more certain and in control. But can be more impaired on decision-making, possibly because angry people are more likely to rely on heuristics than on systematic/analytic processing.

Question 26

What is valence?

Answer 26

Basic dimension of emotions representing the affective component, going from negative (misery) to positive (pleasure).

Question 27

What is arousal?

Answer 27

Basic dimension of emotions indicating how much bodily excitation is stirred, going from absent to strong. 6

Question 28

What is attentional bias?

Answer 28

The selective allocation of attention to mood-related stimuli presented at the same time as neutral stimuli.

Question 29

What is interpretive bias?

Answer 29

The tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations in a mood-related way.

Question 30

What is optimism bias?

Answer 30

The tendency to exaggerate our chances of experiencing positive events and to minimise our chances of experiencing negative events relative to other people.