Week 3 (Cognition & Emotion) Flashcards
Main questions in this topic
-How can cognitive processes modify emotional experience?
-How does emotional information influence cognitive processes
What is emotion
-Conceptualised in many different ways
-Basic emotions, such as happiness, anger, fear are innate and shared through culture
-Positions across two dimensions, valence and arousal, corresponding to positive/negative value
Categorising emotional stimuli
-Fundamental to perception
-Depends on a combination of bottom-up and top-down processes
-These category judgements happen fast
-Stimuli with high relevance for survival and wellbeing of the observer, like a threat, or gratification, prepare the cognitive system to act quickly
Prioritisation of emotional stimuli
-Emotional stimuli receive enhanced, or prioritised cognitive processing
-Due to mechanisms working together.
-Memory based processes + Online appraisal processes
Memory based processes
-Emotional words, images etc., may have stronger long-term memory representations through relevant past experience
Online appraisal processes
A different form of top-down influence, where the cognitive system represents current goals and context
Emotions on the brain
-Presence of the amygdala
-Present in the limbic system, involved in emotion processing
-Receives sensory input and sends info towards other structures
-Enhanced memory for positive/negative stimuli is related to level of amygdala activity at encoding
Visual Search Task (Emotion)
-Search for a target among a field of distractors
-Adapted to include emotional stimuli
Attentional Blink Task
-Phenomenon where the 2nd of two rapidly presented targets is not consciously registered
-Uses a technique called rapid serial visual presentation
-Blink size is about 200-500ms
-Adapted to examine differences when inherently valenced (emotional) stimuli
Anderson (2005) Attentional Blink Task
-Anderson (2005) ran a series of four experiments using neutral vs valenced words in RSVP to examine if AB persisted or was “spared” (alleviated) when 2nd stimulus was emotional
-Investigated whether effects were specific to negative stimuli, or present for both valences
-And whether they could be explained by word distinctiveness (possible confound)
-Found that having an emotional target word (Taboo words) tended to improve accuracy at reporting the 2nd target
-Observed effect was driven by arousal rather than valence
-For word to break through the attentional blink, it had to be rated as emotionally strong and have substantial arousal/intensity.
Perceptual Identification
-Single very brief stimulus
-Followed by mask to prevent further processing
-Two alternative choices then appear, and participant has to choose whoch word originally appeared
Zeelenberg’s two possibilities of Perceptual Identification
Attentional Bias view
Perceptual enhancement view
Attentional Bias view (Zeelenberg)
-Implicit bias to detect emotionally significant stimuli
-Internal mechanism separate from perceptual processing
-Consistent with wider models of attentional control systems
Perceptual enhancement view (Zeelenberg)
-Emotional stimuli receive enhanced perceptual encoding, in addition to possible attentional bias
-In other words, a positive word (e.g, good), should produce more visual activation than a similar neutral word
Results of Perceptual Identification Task
-No effect of FOIL: performance around 73% regardless
-Large effect of TARGET: pos and neg identified significantly better than neutral
Interpretation of Perceptual Identification task results
-If we only had emotional - emotional vs emotional- neutral pairs, we would only measure differences due to attentional bias
-If we only had emotional- emotional vs neutral - neutral pairs, we would only measure differences due to enhanced coding
-Pattern of effects shows enhancing encoding, without attentional bias (amygdala activation early on in visual processing/ long-term memory effects of emotional significance)
-Greater visual similarity might introduce additional bias
Background Mood and Attention
-We can look at background emotional states (or traits) in the observer
-For instance, what effect does background anxiety have on performance in visual attention tasks
-A meta-analysis (Bar-Heim et al. (2007)) looked at level of attentional bias (tendency to focus on negative/threatening) in different anxious and non-anxious populations
Emotional Stroop Task
-In the emotional Stroop, RTs to name/ identify the colour of the word are compared for neutral-word trials (left) and negative trials (right)
-Negative emotional words are expected to exogenously ‘capture’ attention, leading to slower responses
-A “Stroop Effect” can be computed for each ppt as the difference between average RTs in the two conditions.
Explaining Attentional Bias in Anxiety
-The standard interpretation is that individuals high in anxiety exhibit higher threat sensitivity than others
-Quicker to respond to negative/threatening cues in environment and slower to disengage
-There is evidence that this may partly be due to difference in amygdala function
-And evidence of interospective prediciton signals
