Most important stuff Flashcards
-How does Amygdala get involved in emotion?
Step1: evaluates sensory input for emotional significance- receives information from visual and auditory cortices
Step2: determines if there is cause for emotion- prescribes automatic behavior
-What is the debate (older position/ newer work) about specialization of Amygdala?
Older position: fear& other negative emotions
In the beginning there was alot of studies that said that if there is negative emotions and fear causes the amygdala to light up
Newer work: motivational salience
Newer work finds that it needs to be emotionally salient. If you are a chocolate addict your amygdala is going to light up but if your not then it’s probably not going to.
-5 principles of East Asian Thought:
(differences between individualist and collectivist cultures is prominently known)
- Change, everything is not static
- Contradiction, opposites are consistent and both true. Emotions could be both good and bad there may not be this dark contrast
- Covariation, emotions are interrelated in complex fields or systems
- compromise, so that the truth may lie in the synthesis of opposite
- contexts is important, everything is interrelated.
-Why doesn’t body language difference translate to the face?
Authors suggest:
• Facial movements are the result of non-emotional and emotional factors.
• Facial responses recorded are not uniquely related to negative affect.
• Emotional muscle activity diluted by exaggerated non-emotional muscle activity.
• Face represents emotional expression, but also orientation
-Emotional Competence in Children
- Capacity to empathize and sympathize
- Ability to use emotional vocabulary
- Situational/expressive understanding of others’ emotions
- Awareness of one’s own emotions
- Awareness that emotions are the basis of social relationships
- Capacity to self-regulate
- Realizing that inner emotions may not accord with expressed emotion
- Attachment Allows Growth of Autonomy
- Encourages curiosity.
• Security allows luxury of exploration.
• Without ‘safe base’ child will have to be more cautious. - Allow construction of internal model about social interactions.
• Model of cooperation.
• Theory-of-mind, me and you.
-Successful social play relates to emotions:
- Must express appropriate emotions to fulfill play-acting
- children learns expressed emotions may not be felt
- play necessitates emotion regulation. Like sharing.
- Must express appropriate emotions to fulfill play-acting
- children learns expressed emotions may not be felt
- play necessitates emotion regulation. Like sharing.
- knowledge: secret sharing and confidential information, you wouldn’t share things with just anyone
- caring: the affectionate domain. Affiliation motivated by this social drive to connect with people.
- Interdependence: Strong, enduring impact on each other. You have an impact on each other. If this person is upset with you that will affect you but if a stranger does something to you it won’t really affect you down the line.
- Mutality: We vs. you and I. It’s not just the separation of two personalities but there is some overlap. Eg. We love tomatoes vs. you and I love tomatoes.
- Trust: Trusting, etiquette no longer applies. You would eat with a fort and knife around strangers but if you are in an intimate relationship you don’t need to show them you know these things so you can be yourself.
- commitment: Presumed partnership. You can make emotional investments, open up to them .Also monetary investment maybe you buy an apartment together, because this person is here for the long hall.
-Unpacking acceptance
What really needs to be done to help this is (ACT)
Accept you reactions and be present
Choose a valued direction
Take action
Phineas Gag
Damage to prefrontal cortex
Personality changes observed
Unable to regulate emotions
Modern studies with vMPFC damage patients reveal:
Patients make riskier decisions in gambling tasks
Judge law infractions to be more acceptable than healthy controls
Increases in utilitarian moral judgments
amygdala and emotion, which is:
amygdala is more important for social emotion
o Beyond Negative Affect
Classical view that the amygdala only responds to negative affect.
Evidence that this is not the only function:
Emotional intensity ratings seem to correlate with greater amygdala activity.
Amygdala activity seen in response to certain positive stimuli (e.g., erotica).
Amygdala activity not seen in approximately half of fear-elicitation studies.
Amygdala might react to what’s motivationally salient (positive or negative).
What’s motivationally salient for one person may not be for another.
Evidence for motivational salience (Cunningham, Raye, & Johnson, 2005)
Method:
20 participants were assessed for trait differences in promotion vs.
prevention focus.
Rated a series of 144 items on good/bad dimension while in scanner
(e.g. love, murder, guns, babies)
Results:
Those high in prevention focus showed greater amygdala activity to
negative stimuli.
Those high in promotion focus showed greater amygdala activity to
positive stimuli.
Interpretation: amygdala detects stimuli that are motivationally salient.
o Negative Affect or Motivational Salience
Does the amygdala respond to negative affect or does it respond to motivationally
relevant stimuli?
Past work suggests that racial biases predict greater amygdala activity to Black
faces.
BUT… Does this bias suggest negativity?
The Amygdala Responds to Relevant Stimuli (Van Bavel, Packer, & Cunningham, 2008)
Method:
22 participants recruited for fMRI study
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Minimal groups paradigm (tigers vs. leopards)
Each team has 6 white and 6 black members
Participants study and memorize in-group and out-group faces
Participants completed categorization task, while fMRI activity was
recorded.
Had to categorize faces as ingroup or outgroup members, and
whether they were White or Black.
As a baseline, race is emotionally salient.
Trying to take the focus off race and change the
emotional salience to recognition of ingroup members.
Results:
Greater amygdala activity was observed for ingroup member faces than
for outgroup member faces.
No effect of race of amygdala activity.
Interpretation:
Amygdala may react to what is motivationally salient, or to what is
particularly relevant in a given context.
o So far…
Amygdala is implicated in basic emotional processes, but also is involved in our ability to
recognize social emotions.
Implicated in the detection of motivationally relevant stimuli.
Detects and reacts to “what matters” in our environment.
functions of emotion evolution, are they universal
in evolution
Individual: Action readiness
Dyadic: Social coordination
yes
functions culturally are they universal in culture
Reify intentions and values
Reify roles, identities, and ideologies
no
-You need to know the following statements are CORRECT:
People from interdependent cultures find greater happiness in fulfilling duties
• People from interdependent cultures report more intense social emotions (e.g. sympathy, guilt), whereas those from independent cultures report more intense non-social emotions (e.g. pride, frustration).
• Anger is perceived more readily in interdependent cultures, because its’ occurrence is more rare
-You need to remember the following RESULTs about the corresponding experiments (US v.s. Japanese)：
primary “happy themes” for Americans: Personal Achievement, engaging in senses
primary “happy themes” for Japanese: social engagement, ambivalence.
Americans listed significantly more ‘happiness’ features than did the Japanese
Americans rated ‘happiness’ features as significantly more desirable than did the Japanese
-You need to remember the results about cross-cultural variation in expressed emotion （Asian vs. European:
In their physiology the groups did not differ in their physiology. Even though the Asian american showed less coded anger and reported less. This means there is a difference is subjective experience is different from their physiological experience. Which means，under the same anger-stimulation, Asians coded their were less pissed off and Asians expressed less anger while they have the same physiological response with European.
-Remember the RESULTS of the experiment about voice cues and face cues:
• Japanese participants were significantly more accurate at categorizing emotion through voice cues.
• EVEN WHEN… told to ignore voice & focus on face.
Interpretation:
Japanese rely more on verbal emotional cues & less on facial expression of emotion
- Need to know American Gaze and Japanese Gaze:
When asking to describe the emotion of the boy in a picture, American focus on the boy ONLY, while Japanese also look at the CONTEXTS(people around the boy).
-About portraits differences:
Western： innocuous, blurred, face are bigger
Eastern: informative, legible, face are smaller
Differential emotions theory
basic emotions are hard-wired & present from birth
Differentiation theory
infants start out with 2 basic emotion states (negative vs. positive)
Functionalist theory
emotions are social, differ depending on context, and serve communicative function
Emotional intelligence –
ability to communicate, and understand one’s emotions.
Metacognitive skills
includes self-monitoring, self-reflection and self-regulation.
Theory of mind – cognitive understanding of others’ mental states. Ability to infer what others might be thinking, or what their intentions are.
