W3 - Emotion Definition and Their Properties Flashcards
What is the conventional view of emotional experience (what does it include and how)?
Emotions incorporate many responses (e.g., cognitive, somatic, behavioural) to a stimulus and generates a subjective feeling that can be accessed through verbal report
What is the view of Anderson and Adolphs of emotional experience (what does it include and how)?
emotions involve all the same components than the conventional but these are not part of the emotion, rather they are caused by the emotion state
What was the perspective of Darwin on emotions?
Considered from a functional and evolutionary standpoint
Emotions are homologous to our own
What are emotion primitives? Who proposed them?
Emotion primitives are the evolutionary building blocks of emotion that are shared across species.
Anderson and Adolphs
Do we really want to know whether animals have specific emotions (e.g.)?
key question is not if animals share a specific emotion (e.g. fear) but if animals have central states that share features of emotions in general.
Would Anderson and Adolphs agree that emotional stimulus =>behaviour and other responses?
No: stimulus =>central emotion state => behaviour and other responses
If we cant look for “feelings” in animals, what should we aim to look for?
Central emotion states with certain fundamental properties that are causal in responding to certain stimuli with specific behaviours and the corresponding neural mechanisms.
What is different between building blocks and features?
Building blocks:
- essential, basic properties of emotion
- shared by all or most specific emotions
- present in precursors to emotion states in simpler organisms
Features:
- more elaborated and variable properties
of emotions
- not shared by all emotions
Why are Adolphs and Anderson putting together a list of emotion properties?
To have a framework as to what functional components an emotion state should have
Is the provisional list of emotion properties containing building blocks or features?
Both
What are the two fondamental dimensions of core affect?
Arousal and valence
What are the building blocks/features of emotions listed by Adolphs and Anderson?
Scalability
Valence
Persistence
Generalization
Global coordination
Automaticity
Social communication
What is scalability?
Levels of emotional intensity
Can be non-linear
Differentiates from reflexes that are all-or-none
What is valence?
Good- bad, pleasant- unpleasant, appetitive- aversive
Antithesis (Darwin)
What is persistence?
Time course of emotion
Often outlasts the stimulus causing the emotion -> different from reflexes on this level
Allows for integration of information over time
How are called emotion states that last for more than days?
Moods
What might be the function of moods given their persistence?
Deal with events in the past or in the future.
What is generalization? How is it influenced by persistence?
Trans-situationality
Differentiates from reflex
Emotion generated in a specific context can bias cognition when one is reintroduced in a similar context
STIMULUS generalization (fan-in) and EFFECTs (pleiotropy, fan-out) contribute to generalization
An emotion state induced by one stimulus can generalize to a different context and influence responding to different stimuli
What key mechanism increases stimulus generalization?
Learning
What is the utility of categorizing emotions on a multidimensional space?
Assess similarity or difference between different emotional states.
What is global coordination?
Orchestring different and diverse dimensions of emotions (e.g., responses)
Differentiates from reflex
Distributed in time and space
What is automaticity? How can it be managed?
Emotions arise automatically and effortlessly.
Manageable with emotional regulation.
Why can emotions be relevant to social communication? How can that change with volitional control?
Because emotional behaviours are difficult to control, they can serve as authentic social signals about an individual’s emotion state
Volitional control over emotional expressions leads to the possibility of deception and manipulation
What is absolutely necessary for studying emotion states and their neural mechanisms in animals?
Reliable behavioural readouts of experimental manipulations
