W3 - Emotion Definition and Their Properties

Question 1

What is the conventional view of emotional experience (what does it include and how)?

Answer 1

Emotions incorporate many responses (e.g., cognitive, somatic, behavioural) to a stimulus and generates a subjective feeling that can be accessed through verbal report

Question 2

What is the view of Anderson and Adolphs of emotional experience (what does it include and how)?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

What was the perspective of Darwin on emotions?

Answer 3

Considered from a functional and evolutionary standpoint

Emotions are homologous to our own

Question 4

What are emotion primitives? Who proposed them?

Answer 4

Emotion primitives are the evolutionary building blocks of emotion that are shared across species.

Anderson and Adolphs

Question 5

Do we really want to know whether animals have specific emotions (e.g.)?

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

Would Anderson and Adolphs agree that emotional stimulus =>behaviour and other responses?

Answer 6

No: stimulus =>central emotion state => behaviour and other responses

Question 7

If we cant look for “feelings” in animals, what should we aim to look for?

Answer 7

Central emotion states with certain fundamental properties that are causal in responding to certain stimuli with specific behaviours and the corresponding neural mechanisms.

Question 8

What is different between building blocks and features?

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Why are Adolphs and Anderson putting together a list of emotion properties?

Answer 9

To have a framework as to what functional components an emotion state should have

Question 10

Is the provisional list of emotion properties containing building blocks or features?

Answer 10

Both

Question 11

What are the two fondamental dimensions of core affect?

Answer 11

Arousal and valence

Question 12

What are the building blocks/features of emotions listed by Adolphs and Anderson?

Answer 12

Scalability
Valence
Persistence
Generalization
Global coordination
Automaticity
Social communication

Question 13

What is scalability?

Answer 13

Levels of emotional intensity
Can be non-linear
Differentiates from reflexes that are all-or-none

Question 14

What is valence?

Answer 14

Good- bad, pleasant- unpleasant, appetitive- aversive
Antithesis (Darwin)

Question 15

What is persistence?

Answer 15

Time course of emotion
Often outlasts the stimulus causing the emotion -> different from reflexes on this level
Allows for integration of information over time

Question 16

How are called emotion states that last for more than days?

Answer 16

Moods

Question 17

What might be the function of moods given their persistence?

Answer 17

Deal with events in the past or in the future.

Question 18

What is generalization? How is it influenced by persistence?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

What key mechanism increases stimulus generalization?

Answer 19

Learning

Question 20

What is the utility of categorizing emotions on a multidimensional space?

Answer 20

Assess similarity or difference between different emotional states.

Question 21

What is global coordination?

Answer 21

Orchestring different and diverse dimensions of emotions (e.g., responses)
Differentiates from reflex
Distributed in time and space

Question 22

What is automaticity? How can it be managed?

Answer 22

Emotions arise automatically and effortlessly.
Manageable with emotional regulation.

Question 23

Why can emotions be relevant to social communication? How can that change with volitional control?

Answer 23

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

Question 24

What is absolutely necessary for studying emotion states and their neural mechanisms in animals?

Answer 24

Reliable behavioural readouts of experimental manipulations