Module 1: emotions and mood Flashcards
What components does the definition of emotions cover?
1) a physiological reaction to a stimulus, 2) a behavioral response, 3) a feeling, 4) influence cognitive processing, 5) can be triggered by emotionally salient stimuli, 6) unintentionality, 7) evolutionary purpose, and 8) a social and relational aspect: communication
How are emotions and mood different?
Emotion: comprise many components, discrete
Mood: diffuse, longer-lasting subjective feelings
What are the three categorize of emotions?
Basic, complex and dimensional theories of emotion
Describe the difference between basic and complex emotions.
Basic: corresponding to facial expression
Complex: combination of basic, some socially and culturally learned
Explain the concept of universal facial expressions.
Ekman: showed pics of american actors expressing different emotions to a tribe in New Guinea –> they recognized the emotions
Americans also recognized the emotional expressions of the tribe
What are the 6 basic emotions according to Ekman?
happy, sad, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise
What are some other candidate emotions beside the 6 basic suggested by Ekman?
shame, pride, grief
Describe dimensional theories of emotion.
Categorizing emotion is a framework for scientific assessment of emotion - not universal truths
What are some examples of emotion generation theories?
James-Lange, Cannon and Bard, Lazarus, and Singerand Schachter
Briefly describe the differences between the four emotion generation theories,
James-Lange: emotions are feed-back responses of physiological responses
Cannon and Bard: parallel processing, one does not cause the other
Lazarus: risk-benefit appraisal
Singerand Schachter: hierical order from physiological response –> subjective emotional feeling
What are some theories of basic emotions?
What are emotional biases?
Attention, encoding and memory
Give an exampel of how attention is a bias.
Emotional triggers –> higher attention
Negative info is prioritized
Give an exampel of how memory is a bias.
Negative emotions (danger) does not make the memory more accurate, but more vivid
What is a FlashBulb memory?
A very vivid memory (almost a flash of pictures), e.g., where was I when 9/11 happened, small reliability
What brain region is behind the voluntary down-regulation of emotions, and how is this region different in BIP patients?
The dorsal prefrontal cortex
In BIP: hypoactive - patients cannot down-reg emotions properly
Describe the role of the amygdala in implicit emotional learning.
The amygdala seems to play a role in implicit eversive learning: a patient with amygdala impairment does not show a physiological response prior to “fear response”, but remembers the trigger
Describe what role the amygdala seems to play in the processing of emotional facial expression.
the amygdala contributes to direct visual attention to the eyes when encountering any facial expression
Describe what role the insula seems to play in the processing of emotional facial expression.
Insula may play a broad role in associating cognitive and affective process
(valence and arousal are decreased in patients with impaired insula)
Give some examples of physiological measures of emotional processing.
fMRI, HR, electrodermal activity (sweat), respiratory rate, subjective emotional response
Give some examples of behavioral measures of emotional processing.
Fear conditioning and emotional attentional blink
Describe widely used tests in decision making.
Loss aversion: will you take the bet if the win/lose is equal?
Iowa gambling task: sunjects learn to draw cards from decks that lead to monetary gains, and avoid losses
Define general maturational trends in grey and white matter structure during childhood and adolescence.
From grey to white: apperent cortical thickness related to age
Describe general sex differences in brain maturation
Overall cortical volume: males have larger volumes
Age of peak: females peak earlier (in FA and MD)
Characterize how the grey and white matter matures in a regional specific pattern.
Visual, sensory and motor cortices mature earlier than higher order association cortices
Describe the major concepts of the hierarchical development model
Moves from more “bottom-up” driven to become better at “top-down” control
Describe how adolescents differ from children and adults in their activity pattern during emotional face tasks
Overactive amygdala
Shows a shift from positive to negative functional coupling with age
What may explain the impulsive behavior of adolescents?
OVeractive amygdala and ventral striatum –> “approach” motivation bias towards stimuli that gives a reward
What does more negative coupled ventromedial PFC-amygdala reflect?
Better amygdala habituation
What does higher anxiety trait reflect?
Poorer amygdala habituation
