Lecture 12 Cognition & Emotion Flashcards
What is a mood?
Low intensity, diffuse and enduring
Doesn’t have a cause necessarily
What are characteristics of emotion?
More intense and short lived than moods
But has a cause
And can seep into mood
What is a state?
Mood or affect.
Transient and variable
What is a trait?
Stable personality characteristic.
It is enduring
Eg angry, impulsive.
Some traits can make people more likely to display certain states
What does affect refer to?
Valence of both mood or emotions
What are ekman’s big 5 / 6?
Anger, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness, surprise.
Are genetically hard wired into us, as even pre literate papa New Guinea tribe used the same facial expressions.
Non verbal information to the cog system
What is the dimensional approach to emotion?
Emotional can be seen as states on a two dimensional state space
The two dimensions are
Valence - positive/negative or pleasant/unpleasant
Arousal - calm/aroused
What did Lang et al so in terms of dimensional emotion?
They made an affect grid, which found that there wasn’t really any emotion that was highly arousing, but neutral valence.
Indicates that if we find something arousing, it’s either good or bad.
What did Bradley et al (1992) find with memory and emotion?
Had people study images and rate them on dimensions of valence and arousal.
Did immediate and delayed recall test a year later.
Pictures rated highly arousing were remembered better than other pictures, both immediate and a year later.
Valence didn’t matter
Said that arousal functions as a kind of elaborating encoding
Events that are highly arousing are likely to be associated with survival, regardless if it’s good or bad
What is the emotional stroop effect?
When presented a list of emotional (threat related)words in colours, and neutral words in colours and have to just say the colour of the word….people with high trait anxiety are slower at ththe emotional words because they experience interference.
Anxiety related attentional bias
Find it harder to suppress the meaning of the words.
What did McLeod find with the dot probe test?
Anxiety has the bias to be drawn to anxiety related stimuli…
Presented a threatening word and a neutral word at either top or bottom of screen, then showed a dot probe
Measured RT, how fast people detected its location.
People who had anxiety were faster at finding the dot when the dot appeared where the threatening word was.
Effect is greater in clinically anxious people than trait anxious people
And effect is largest when prob people are presented with a word directly related to their phobia
What were McLeod’s findings in terms of control subjects?
Dot probe test
Control subjects were faster when the dots appeared in the neutral areas of the screen.
What is evidence of attentional biases in anxiety?
Dot probe task - anxious people attend to threatening words.
Emotional stroop task - anxious people experienced more interference and could not suppress threatening words
Compared to control subjects
Collins and quillian semantic network model?
Knowledge is represented in a hierarchical semantic network of interconnected nodes.
Lower down nodes all inherit the info from above
Distance between nodes represents similarity between them
What is spreading activate in semantic networks?
When the activation of one category spreads taxonomically superordonate concept (concepts above it)
This helps for property inheritance and generalisation of new knowledge! New stuff can be placed subordinate and inherit all the nodes above
