Week 13: Emotional And Social Neuroscience Flashcards
What are challenges of scientific studies studying emotion?
- difficult to get people to feel things in an experimental setting
- Emotional facial expressions might not evoke symmetric emotions in an observer
Why are the fields of cognitive and social neuroscience so closely linked?
Social stimuli as main research tool when studying neuroscience of emotion
What are different methods of emotion / mood induction?
- social stimuli (pictures of people with emotional facial expressions) („sender“)
- Music
What are emotions according to Skinner?
Excellent examples of fictional causes to which we commonly attribute behaviour
What is an emotion?
- complex state
- Triggered by external or internal stimuli
- Has a valence (positive/ negative)
- Involves reactions of multiple response systems:
- Physiological
- Behavioural dispositions
- Subjective experiences
→ NOTE: this definition is missing an intensity/ or arousal component
What is a feeling ?
Subjective experience aspect of emotion
What is a mood?
Slowly changing and less intense emotional state without clear trigger
What do peripheral responses in emotions look like?
- involve the arousal system
- Sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system
What characterises the parasympathetic nervous system?
- „rest and digest“
- Stimulates digestion, constrict pupil, slows heartbeat, etc
- Deactivates
What characterises the sympathetic nervous system?
- „Fight and flight“
- Defending fibres stimulate e.g. sweat production, increased heartrate
- Activates
How do we measure peripheral (bodily) responses in emotions?
Cardiovascular → heartrate
Electrodermal/ skin conductance → sweat
Polygraph (e.g. in lie detector tests)
James-Lange Theory
- contrary to popular belief the emotion is the feeling of the changes that occur in the following order
1. trigger (scary dog)
2. Bodily reaction to said trigger (trembling)
3. Bodily reaction is perceived → Emotion (Fear)
How can we critique James-Lange Theory?
- double dissociation is possible
- how does my heart know about the dog, what makes it beat faster?
→ through the senses
→ senses go through the brain
→ some type of processing happens already before the bodily reactio
What is the „limbic system“?
- a network of brain regions that form a „rim“ around the corpus callosum
- Divergent definitions
- Emotional states have been traditionally associated with the limbic system
Why is the limbic system outdated as a theory of emotion?
- unclear definition → not helpful
- Contains some regions that are involved in emotional processing (e.g. amygdala and sometimes OFC)
- BUT other regions involved in emotional process are not part of the limbic system
- It‘s not a real system → random collection of areas, that are not more connected to each other than they are to other areas
What is the circumflex model?
- valence and arousal as main components
- emotions fall like 2d-points on the system
→ Assigning all emotions a space along x-axis from negative to positive valence and y-axis from low to high arousal
in what sense does the circumflex model contradict the James-Lange Theory?
It allows comparable arousal levels of autonomous nervous system despite different valence
What is the idea of basic emotions?
- method of categorical definition of emotions
- Stereotypical cross-cultural facial expressions of the basic emotions
- Include:
- Anger
- Fear
- Disgust
- Surprise
- Happiness
- Sadness
- unclear whether there should be more emotions added
What emotion is associated with the insular cortex?
Disgust (insula lesions result in impaired facial and vocal expression recognition of disgust)
→ disgust is clearly linked to interoception
What emotion is the Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) associated with?
Anger (instructor study)
→ Direction of causation: unclear whether activation of dACC (also part of pain matrix) reflects anger caused by pain or does it reflect the pain that causes anger
What is surprise?
A deviation from predictions
- reward prediction error
- Predictive coding in general
- VTA, ventral attentional network
What brain regions are associated with happiness and sadness?
- reward network (Pleasant stimuli of different modalities cause activation)
- Also superior temporal Gyrus, probably due to use of face stimuli
- Unclear
- Double dissociation between happiness and sadness in medial FPC and OFC
How do emotions code on PET and fMRI studies?
- Low specificity (no sparseness) of brain regions for emotions
- Emotions are not coded in a „ sparse“ or „ labelled“ line code
What is Cowen and Keltners idea for emotions?
- many different „basic“ emotions (are all triggered by different stimuli)
- 27 dimensions
