Lecture 21 Flashcards
Why is emotion usually neglected by cognitive psychologists?
Because of the dominance of the computer hypothesis and computers don’t have emotions. Also, emotions are considered as irrational thought and are difficult to research. Fortunately, researchers are beginning to understand that cognitions and emotions are closely connected. E.g. Capgras syndrome; when the emotional pathway is damaged people can recognise their friends but believe it’s an imposter as it doesn’t ‘feel’ like them. Also, Phineas Gage.
Discuss brain regions and emotion
The amygdala is known to be involved with fear for example. Other areas are associated with other emotions, however, it can be localised to one area. Many areas of the brain are involved with each emotion.
What is emotion?
How is this different to mood?
Short lived mental states that are associated with an environmental or cognitive event. They’re also reactions to a changing environment and they prompt action.
They have 4 key features; bounded episodes relevant to one’s needs, they prepare the organism to react, they affect almost all bodily systems and they establish control over behaviour. They’re intense and short lived.
However, mood is continuous, less intense and non-specific. For example, we know the cause of our anger but not the cause of a bad mood. Also, moods can be caused by emotions.
Discuss core emotions
Darwin and Ekman both proposed the idea of 6 core emotions; anger, fear, surprise, happiness, sadness, disgust. These emotions are universal and seem to be present from a very early age. Blind people also had these facial expressions and have similar expressions to family members showing the inheritance of idiosyncratic features. However, learning is still vital in the development. Additionally, Ekman expanded the list of core emotions but used English terms, it included pride, desire, shame etc. This therefore has its complications as there are cross cultural variations when describing emotions so there could be more emotions present in a different culture. E.g. germans have a word for feeling happy due to someone’s difficulties.
What is the core of emotion?
There are 4 components of emotion; cognitive (e.g. responding to a perceived threat), motivational-behavioural (e.g. behaviour in response to emotion), somatic (activation of the CNS/ANS) and subjective-experiential (e.g. the emotional experience).
What comes first, behaviour or emotion?
James-Lange suggests behaviour comes first, for example facial feedback studies. In contrast, people with spinal cord injuries can still feel emotion without the behaviour and people blush AFTER they feel embarrassed.
Cannon argues that it occurs in parallel because emotion and physiological change can occur without the other and physiological change is too slow to be the cause of emotion.
However, these theories ignore the effect of cognition. Schachter therefore created the two factor model of emotion; Physiological arousal and our interpretation of the arousal. The issue with this idea is that we can feel emotions without any arousal; the arousal just dictates the intensity of the emotion.
Discuss Schachter’s work on cognition and emotion
They found that cognition was involved with emotion because they injected their participants with adrenaline (ppts didn’t know it was adrenaline). When the ppts weren’t told about the side effects, their emotions copied those of the confederate in the waiting room as they couldn’t explain their feelings in another way. This is cognitive labelling. Not many studies have replicated these findings.
Also, another study was done where men were told to write a story by an experimenter after crossing a scary bridge. When the experimenter was female, the stories were more sexual because they misattributed their arousal from the bridge with attraction. This supports the two factor model as their cognitions (that were observing environmental cues) interpreted their arousal to form their emotion.
These show that how we label our arousal is important in the emotion experienced.
Discuss affective primacy
Zajonc believes there is no cognition involved with emotion. He did one study where participants were shown a shape for 5 milliseconds. They were then shown two shapes (one of which was the one they briefly saw) and had to decide which they preferred. The results showed that the participants did not recognise either shape but almost all said they preferred the one they saw earlier, thus showing a judgement without cognition. Also, when sad faces were shown subliminally, before participants saw a chinese symbol, then the participants would guess the symbol was negative. This shows that cognition (even if it was unconscious cognition) influenced emotion when the message was subliminal. Therefore, emotions can be affected by unconsciously perceived stimuli.
Discuss cognitive primacy
This believes that you cannot separate the cognitive aspect of emotion. There are three appraisals; primacy appraisal (assessing a situation, is it threatening or irrelevant), secondary appraisal (assessing the resources available) and reappraisal (monitoring the situation until it’s resolved). For example, when a narrator describes an event as traumatic, we have more arousal to it. However, this isn’t ecologically valid and the results haven’t been replicated. This appraisal theory and the affective primacy theory both explain individual differences in emotion, but they ignore social factors and aren’t always essential in emotional experience.
Discuss LeDoux’s multilevel explanation of cognition and emotion
This idea believes that cognition is sometimes involved and sometimes it isn’t. There are two circuits (only found with fear); the slow acting thalamus-cortex-amygdala circuit (detailed analysis of sensory information) and the fast acting thalamus-amygdala circuit (it bypasses the cortex and responds rapidly). This explains how emotion can affect attention, perception and memory.
Discuss how emotion affects attention, perception and memory (cognitive processes)
Positive moods increase your percpetion to peripheral stimuli and vice versa with negative moods. This was shown when participants looked at a face stuck onto a picture of a house; positive moods took the house into account shown via brain activations. This accounts for the weapon focus effect.
In the emotional stroop task, spider phobics pay more attention to words of that category like web and hairy. This was supported with other disorders like depression and anxiety. However, it’s unknown whether the phobia is the cause of this attentional bias or vice versa.
The network theory has shown that when in a sad mood, your ability to remember sad memories improves, and the same for happy moods. This is called state dependent memory and could help you remember things in an exam. Emotions are nodes in the semantic network and when they’re activated, thought occurs. Also, our thoughts are congruent with our emotions. However, people have had difficulty supporting this theory and it’s an optimistic belief as most studies have only supported it when the emotion is intense.
Discuss anxiety/depression and cognitive biases
Anxiety; future threats
Depression; past trauma
Cognitive biases are what makes these disorders endure. There are 4 types of cognitive bias; attentional bias (selective attention to threat related stimuli), interpretive bias (interpreting ambiguous stimuli as threatening), explicit memory bias (retrieving negative information on explicit memory tests) and implicit memory bias (superior performance for negative information on implicit memory tests). The schemas for this are activated when in a depressed/anxious mood and they cause the biases according to Beck. However, there is little evidence for these schemas becoming positive.
What is the core of emotion?
It is unknown, it could be physiology, appraisal (cognition), both or situational factors.
