L9: Emotion and Cognition Flashcards
What is meant by ‘affective’
emotions and preferences
What is meant by appraisals?
If we think or reason about emotions
*Explain Ekman’s study of basic emotions
6 basic expressions of emotion:
- anger
- disgust
- fear
- happiness
- sadness
- surprise
Each basic emotion is characterized by a unique subset of facial muscle movements
What are the features of the 6 basic emotions?
- universal
- innate
- unique subset of facial muscle movements
Where is anger in the brain?
Involved in many regions depending on different aspects
Where is disgust in the brain?
Insular cortex, basal ganglia
Where is fear located in the brain?
Amygdala
Where is sadness located in the brain?
Reduced cortical activation and connectivity
What happens to a patient with amygdala damage?
They struggle to perceive / recognise fear in others.
What are the basal ganglia and insular cortex?
They are involved in experiencing and recognizing disgust
*What is the circumplex model of human emotion?
Emotions are defined on a spectrum of arousal and valence (subjective experience of emotional quality: good vs bad) (Barrett & Russell, 1999; Russell, 1980).
What is the geneva emotion wheel?
Similar to circumplex model but spectrum is along pleasantness and control
What is meant by “approach” and “withdrawal” emotions?
Approach emotions evoke the desire to approach the stimulus object or situation.
Withdrawal emotions evoke the desire to withdraw from objects or situations linked to these emotions.
What are the 2 main strategies to manipulate emotions for scientific study?
Evocative stimuli
Mood induction
What is evocative stimuli?
Stimuli that elicit emotional responses
What is mood induction?
mood is a more stable and diffuse affective state than emotion (longer lasting and not necessarily linked to a specific event or object).
What is direct assessment?
A way of measuring emotions that rely on introspection and is affected by cultural conventions.
- self-report measures
What is an indirect assessment to measure emotions?
Behaviour (decisions)
Pupil dilation, skin conductance, heart rate, respiratory rate….
Why/how can we measure emotions with electrodes on the body?
Our peripheral nervous system is not only regulating bodily functions
It is also affected by emotional states
E.g. we can measure arousal (a component of emotional states) with electrophysiological measures.
How can a stimulus gain or lose value?
Classical conditioning - repeated co-occurrence of stimuli will lead to association.
What are the two types of emotional conditioning?
Autonomic conditioning: can be expressed through bodily responses, such as arousal response
Evaluative conditioning: can be expressed through a preference or attitude
What is double dissocitation?
Amygdala is involved in anticipation of negative stimuli (conditioned autonomic responses)
How are the amygdala and hippocampus connected (aversive conditioning)?
Amygdala mediates learning that is associated with fear or stimulus valence (extremes of good or bad).
Hippocampus holds memory of what association that is.
What is evaluative conditioning?
Learned subjective preferences or attitudes
Acquired through classical conditioning.
The goal of many forms of advertising.
What is reversing conditioning?
Learned associations can be unlearned again.
If the conditioned stimulus is presented repeatedly without the negative experience.
Explain instructional and observational learning
If instructions or observations (media) are threatening enough, we also learn emotional responses to things we are unlikely to experience (e.g., germs, sharks, terrorists).
This works because we evolved complex communication (language) which allows us to experience things ‘vicariously’ (embodiment, simulation)
Learning via instruction and via conditioning activate the same brain networks
What are mirror neurons?
Learning vicariously
They fire when we do a task, or observe another doing the same task.
We also mirror emotions and pain of others.
How does emotion affect memory?
Highly emotional memories are more robust to forgetting
Amygdala mediates emotional memories by interacting with the hippocampus
Arousal enhances consolidation » better memory of high arousal situations
How does emotion capture attention?
Emotion increases salience of stimuli and hence perceptual processing of and attention towards them.
As a result, other stimuli presented at the same time get processed less and are less attended to.
This can facilitate (if emotion stimulus is target) or decrease (if the emotional stimulus is not the target) performance in tasks,
What is the effective primacy hypothesis?
The affective primacy hypothesis proposes that emotional stimuli are processed relatively automatically, making fewer demands on limited cognitive resources than do other types of stimuli (Wundt, 1907).
Supported by findings of pop out effects for:
- emotional faces in crowds,
- enhanced stimulus detection in neglect patients
