Lecture 5 Flashcards
Valence
Good- bad, pleasant- unpleasant, appetitive- aversive. Valence is thought by many psychological theories to be a necessary feature of emotion experience (or ‘affect). It corresponds to the psychological dimensions of pleasantness/unpleasantness, or the stimulus-response dimension of appetitive vs. aversive (but again, these two are not the same thing).
Scalability
The intensity of an emotion. Responses can scale in a graded way or with qualitative shifts. An emotion state can scale in intensity. Importantly, parametric scaling can result in discontinuous behaviours, such as the transition from hiding to fleeing during the approach of a predator. Intensity is often conceptualized as arousal, although these two are not the same thing.
Persistence
An emotion state outlasts its eliciting stimulus, unlike reflexes, and so can integrate information over time, and can influence cognition and behaviour for some time. Different emotions have different persistence. Emotions typically persist for seconds to minutes. This property allows for integration of information with other internal states and processes: learning, generalization, etc.
Generalization
- Context generalization (trans-situationality) : once elicited, an emotional state can persist across contexts (unlike reflexes, which are the same across situations)
- Stimulus generalization (‘stimulus degeneracy’): one emotional state can arise from different stimuli. Implicates learning
- Pleiotropy: one emotional state can induce multiple different outcomes (behavioral, physiological, somatic, etc. changes). Relates to global coordination.
Emotions & Learning
- Stimulus generalization is closely linked to learning
- Most stimuli that cause emotions gain this property through experience (i.e. associative emotional learning)
- The best understood example of this is Pavlovian conditioning
Global coordination
Emotion states causally interact with other internal states to a large extent. Emotions influence behaviour & cognition as well as endocrine and autonomic responses (pleiotropy). Emotions evolved to deal with challenges that required a whole body response. Outputs of emotion states need to be cohesive and to achieve this, they need to be coordinated. This coordination is a global feature of emotions and a property to look for in the brain. It’s also another differentiation from reflexes.
Examples of global coordination
Anatomical projections to different downstream targets: ex. projections from the central nucleus of the amygdala to brain stem and hypothalamic nuclei mediate different components of the fear response. There are many more projections (including cortex) and there are also reciprocal connections from most of the regions. This is likely too simple to be a full explanation of coordination because emotion states are almost certainly more distributed than one single brain region. Also, different subsets of responses are seen on different occasions and/or on different time scales
Coordination mechanisms
Synchronized oscillations across networks of brain regions could be another potential mechanism of coordination. For example, freezing (fear response) associates with a brain state of synchronized 4Hz oscillations in prefrontal cortex and amygdala. 4Hz oscillations provide longrange coupling of the neural activity in dmPFC and BLA, allowing for periods of synchronous coactivation of single neurons, which are believed to be involved in processes of information flow and synaptic plasticity
Coordination systems
There are multiple system architectures that could achieve co-ordination. Distributed systems could control individual components with synergistic/antagonistic interactions between components. Centralized systems with a single command neuron could execute a range of responses. Likely the brain uses multiple solutions to co-ordinate responses to emotion states
What is still to be understood about global coordination
The coordinated control exerted by emotion states is distributed in time and space. Emotion states often involve a large time range of sensorimotor processing (ex. shrinking back from an attacking bear vs planning how to escape from a bear that is still some distance away)
This is extraordinarily complex because it is distributed in space and time but also the many components of the response interact with each other. Much remains to be understood about how this occurs
Automaticity
Somewhat like reflexes, emotion states exhibit automaticity over behaviour i.e. no effort is required to elicit the behaviour. It is generally effortful to inhibit the behavioural response. Emotions could be thought of as an ‘interrupt’ mechanism for prioritizing urgent/important needs. Control of emotions most commonly observed in adult humans. In young children and animals, emotion seems to exert a larger control on behaviour. Emotion regulation through conscious control may be largely unique to adult humans.
Emotion regulation
The ability to have some degree of control over your emotion state. Regulation could occur at multiple levels:
- at the point of inducing the emotion state (ex. choosing circumstances and environments that will influence if and how an emotion is induced, like avoiding taking a class that has an oral presentation to avoid experiencing fear of public speaking)
- reappraising the stimulus(ex. internally reinterpreting a situation that could induce an emotion, like a friend ignores you when you say hello to them in the hall, you convince yourself they didn’t hear you.)
- directly trying to control the experience or expression of the emotion state (ex. telling yourself to stop feeling sad)
Emotion regulation and PTSD
Disrupted emotion regulation is implicated in a range of psychiatric disorders. For example, PTSD, phobias, depression. Cognitive-behavioral therapies develop strategies to re-establish cognitive control over one’s emotions.
Emotion regulation in the brain
Emotional regulation involves the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is one of the last brain regions to develop and plays a major role in emotional regulation. There are also substantial species differences in prefrontal cortex and it is largest and most elaborated in humans. This could be relevant to understanding differences in emotion regulation.
Social communication
Because emotional behaviours are difficult to control, they can serve as authentic social signals about an individual’s emotion state. Emotional behaviours are poised to be co-opted as social communication signals. We can infer something about another person or animal’s emotion state from their behaviour. But are we always right?
