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
What did Meyer and schvaneveldt (1971) find with semantic priming?
People had to make lexical decisions
Say yes if the two words shown were actually words
And no if the two words were not
Showed words that were relate (doctor and nurse) and words that were not related.
Words that were related we recognised faster, due to SEMANTIC PRIMING - the first word activated the nodes, and thus can recognise the related word faster
Shows that semantic priming effect is implicit and automatic because people weren’t asked to pay attention to meaning and the relation of words
What is the mood congruency effect in memory? (MCM)
Bower
Hypnotised people to be either happy or sad
Read either a happy and sad story
Test recall for content of two stories
Recall was best when mood and content was the same
(Happy recalled happy story best)
What is the mood dependent effect on memory (MDM)?
Bower
Induce mood.
Learn neutral words.
Induce either another mood or the same mood and do a recall test.
Recall is better if the MOOD AT ENCODING matches the MOOD AT RETRIVAL.
Emotional states serves as a retrieval cue to aid memory.
What’s the diff between MCM and MDM?
MCM (congruent effect) is when the mood at encoding matches he mood of the information
MDM (dependent effect) is when mood at encoding matches the mood of retrieval
What was bower’s semantic network theory of emotion and cognition? And what were the two main mechanisms?
Emotions are represented as nodes in a network, and are connected to related concepts, events, and emotions.
The activation of an emotion mode causes partial activation, or priming like of all other nodes within its associated network through SPREADING ACTIVATION, leading to less activation needed for retrieval of congruent nodes.
INHIBITION of incongruent emotion nodes also occurs
Explains MCM and MDM
How does semantic network models explain cognition in depression?
Due to affect priming, depressed mood lowers the threshold for associated concepts and events, making them even more available for retrieval.
Positively valences concepts and memories are also inhibited.
Creates vicious cycle
