Task5 - Emotional Learning + Memory

Question 1

What is emotion?

Answer 1

Cluster of 3 distinct but interrelated phenomena:

1. physiological responses (heart rate…)
2. overt behaviors (facial expression…)
3. conscious feeling (subjective experience)

Question 2

Universal emotions

Answer 2

Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise

• > all humans from all cultures feel and recognize these
• > different cultures may teach different rules of expression

Question 3

Arousal= fight-or-flight response

Answer 3

Collection of bodily responses that prepare the body to face a threat (e.g. increased blood flow, respiration + depressed digestion and immune function)

Question 4

How dies arousal evolve?

Answer 4

1. brain senses a challenge/ threat
2. autonomic nervous system (collection of nerves that control internal organs and glands without conscious control) sends signal to adrenal glands
3. adrenal glands release stress hormones (e.g. norepinephrine, glucorticoids, cortisol)

Question 5

Stress

Answer 5

Any event/ stimulus that causes bodily arousal and release of stress hormones -> prepares to deal with challenge

Question 6

James - Lange theory of emotion

Answer 6

Conscious feelings of emotion occur when mind senses physiological responses associated with kind of arousal

Emotional stimulus -> bodily response (arousal) -> conscious emotion (fear)

Interpretation of physiological responses

Question 7

Somatic theories of emotion

Answer 7

Theories of emotion with central idea that physiological responses to stimuli come first (e.g. when smiling -> becoming happy)

Question 8

Cannon-Bard theory of emotion

Answer 8

Believes that conscious emotions stimulate appropriate behaviors and physiological responses

Stimuli simultaneously evoke both emotions and arousal with neither causing the other

Question 9

Two-factor theory of emotion/ modern-emotional theory

Answer 9

Theory that combines cognitive appraisal and perception of biological changes together determines our experience of emotions

Emotional stimulus-> bodily response + cognitive appraisal (interpretation of environment) -> conscious emotional feelings

Question 10

Fear response in animals

Answer 10

Many species show piloerection = body hair stands on end-> animal looks bigger= more threatening

Question 11

Conditioned emotional responses

Answer 11

Learning to predict danger

Conditioned emotional responses are very long lasting and heard to extinguish

Question 12

Conditioned escape

Answer 12

Operant conditioning: discriminative stimulus Sd (initiation of a shock) evokes behavioral response (climbing on platform), leading to and outcome (escaped from water)

Question 13

Conditioned avoidance

Answer 13

Animal learns to make particular responses to avoid or prevent exposure to an aversive stimulus

1. stage - classical conditioning -> emotional response
2. stage - operant conditioning -> avoidance response is reinforced

Question 14

Learned helplessness

Answer 14

Phenomenon in which exposure to an uncontrollable punisher teaches an expectation that responses are ineffectual, which in turn reduces the motivation to attempt new avoidance responses
-> once you learn you can‘t escape -> you won‘t learn to escape later when it would be possible

Question 15

Mood congruency of memory

Answer 15

Likewise easier to retrieve memories that match our current mood/ emotional state

Question 16

Emotion and encoding of memories experiment

Answer 16

Researcher create emotional experiences in lab

• > tell 2 different stories to two groups (beginning and ending are the same, middle part is either dramatic or neutral, same dramatic pictures were presented)
• > people with dramatic middle part were able to recall the story in more details and beginning and ending were worse
• > strong encoding and persistence of emotionally charged memories

Question 17

Flashbulb memories

Answer 17

Memory formed under conditions of extreme emotions that’s seems especially vivid and long lasting -> form quickly, vivid, stored forever

-> often not as accurate as we think they are, source monitoring, constantly rehearsed-> fill in gaps of own memory

Question 18

Key brain structures involved in processing emotion

Answer 18

Hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, thalamus, frontal cortex (interpretation)

Question 19

Amygdala

Answer 19

Collection. Of brain nuclei lying at anterior tip of each hippocampus
-> critical for learning and expressing emotional responses + mediating emotional modulation of memory formation

Question 20

Process in amygdala

Answer 20

1. lateral nucleus = primary entry point for sensory information (arrives from thalamus)
2. central nucleus receives inputs from other amygdala nuclei -> projects out of amygdala to autonomic nervous system (ANS) -> physiological responses
3. basolateral nucleus receives input from lateral nucleus -> projects to cerebral cortex, basal ganglia, and hippocampus -> providing pathway by which memory can be modulated

Question 21

Amygdala in learning and expressing conditioned emotional responses

Answer 21

Central nucleus in amygdala provides major outputs from amygdala to ANS and motor centers that drive freezing response
-> lesion to central nucleus disrupts ability to express learned fear response