Week 8 Flashcards
What is consciousness content?
Information that we are aware of at any given moment
Consciousness
The experience of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, awareness of the external world and self awareness in humans.
Main function of consciousness
Social
Conscious level
State of consciousness. It runs from the total unconsciousness found in coma through to alert wakefulness. These two aspects of consciousness are related – a non-zero conscious level is required for an individual to experience conscious content or awareness.
Phenomenal consciousness
Hard problems
Raw conscious experience.
Describes feelings, sensations, and orienting to the present moment. A basic form of consciousness
Known as the hard problem of consciousness
An example of this form of consciousness: “I cannot only feel pain and see red, but think to myself, ‘Hey, here I am, Steve Pinker, feeling pain and seeing red!’.”
Access consciousness
Access consciousness can be reported and its contents are available for use by other cognitive processes (e.g., attention, memory).
Easy problems
Understanding our ability to discriminate and categorise environmental stimuli
Integrate information
Access our own internal state
Control our behaviour
It is easy to work out why something is the way it is.
Functions of consciousness
Perceiving the environment.
Role in communication and what other people are thinking.
Controls our actions
Allows us to think about events and issues that have passed. Conscious thoughts wander away from us 30% of the time.
Involves integrating and combining numerous types of information.
Unconscious processes
Argued that are of limited value.
Sigmund Fraud and unconsciousness
Believed it has great value. Perceptual processes Learning Memory Decision making Possibility
Yes it can principle
Yes it can because unconscious processes can perform the same high-level cognitive functions as conscious processes. Reasoning, goal pursuit, cognitive control.
Cognitive psychology literature relating to emotion are:
The role of cognition in emotion.
How emotion can be regulated by deliberate cognitive efforts.
The influence of emotion on the way that we think.
The role of biases in the way that we think based on the relationship between emotion and cognition e.g. as assumed in cognitive behavioural therapies and schema therapies.
Valence
The positive and negative character of emotional experience.
Refers to a dimension running from very negative to very positive.
The difference between moods and emotions
Emotions:
Last for less time
Are more intense than moods
Are caused by a specific event (passing an exam)
Emotions can cause moods and a mood can turn into an emotion.
Affect
Encompasses both both emotions and moods.
Positive and negative affect
Positive affect:
Positive emotions and moods
Negative affect:
Negative emotions and mood
What are the two structures or approaches of emotions:
Categorical approach:
Emotions such as happiness, anger, fear, disgust and sadness. This approach fits your subjective experience.
Dimensional approach:
Misery-pleasure (valence) and arousal-sleep.
Emotion perception
Involves core effect (negative and positive valence), plus a more specific categorisation based on language
Emotional experience depends on
Bottom up (stimulus driven) processes involving attention and perception. Top down processes involving appraisal of the situation drawing of stored knowledge of similar situations.
Which parts of the brain are activated in bottom-up conditions associated with visual perceptual processing.
Occipital, temporal and parietal lobes.
High level of activation in amygdala for negative affect.
Which parts of the brain are activated in top down processing?
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and medial associated with high-level cognitive processes. Anterior cingulate and amygdala were also activated.
Self reported negative affect is associated with which part of the brain?
Activation of the medial prefrontal cortex - associated with producing cognitive representations of stimulus
Inhibitory control
One of the most important top down processes in human cognition.
Showed smaller increases in anger and anxiety.
It can reduce the experience of negative emotional states.
Emotions are
feeling or affect states that involve a pattern of cognitive, physiological and behavioural reactions to events.
Emotions theorist Richard Lazarus
Motivations and emotions are linked because we react emotionally when our motives and goals are gratified, threatened or frustrated. Winning or losing.
Emotional states four common features:
Emotions are triggered by Eliciting Stimuli:
Trigger cognitive appraisals and emotional responses. Not always external. Thinking about a holiday can make us happy.
Emotional responses to Stimuli: which give the situations its perceived meaning and significance: Innate biological factors help determine which stimuli have the greatest potential to arouse emotions: Newborn - respond emotionally to the environment adults - scared of spiders as they may be dangerous.
Body responds physiologically to our appraisals. Aroused, angry, depressions.
Emotions include behaviour tendencies:
Smiling with joy, crying.
Instrumental behaviours - doing something about the stimulus that evoked emotion - fighting back in self defence. Studying for an anxiety arousing exam.
Illustration of four emotional components
Insulting remark from another person (eliciting stimulus)
Components of emotion
Relations between eliciting stimuli, cognitive appraisal processes, physiological arousal, expressive behaviours and instrumental behaviours.
Reciprocal two way causal relations between appraisal, physiological and expressive and instrumental.
Appraisal influences arousal.
Cognitive appraisals are
The interpretations and meanings that we attach to sensory stimuli. The inner experience of emotion. Someone walking into us.. we can think it was an accident, or that they did it on purpose.
Both conscious and unconscious are involved in appraisals.
How can emotions can influence cognition?
No immediate danger, however walking down a dark ally might alert you to possible danger, eliciting fear.
Attentional bias
People who experience anxiety are quicker to identify something threatening.
Even if it is subliminal.
How do different cultures use appraisal of situations?
Tahitians believe that if you are alone bad spirits may bother you. For Eskimos it signifies rejection and loneliness. For westerners it might be respite from daily life and happiness.
The psychological component - body parts are involved.
Brain region, autonomic nervous system and endocrine system.
Brain structures and neurotransmitters for emotions
Limbic system and cerebral cortex.
Destroying the limbic system will produce an absence of aggression in animals. Other areas of that system will show the opposite - lack of emotion when they are stimulated.
Cognitive appraisal process involve the
Cerebral cortex where mechanisms for language and complex thought reside.
The cortex has which connections in the brain?
Hypothalamus, amygdala, and other limbic system structures.
How is emotion regulated?
The executive function of the prefrontal cortex, which lies immediately behind the forehead.
What happens to the thalamus (the brain’s sensory switchboard) when it receives input from senses?
It sends messages along two independent neural pathways:
High road - travels up the cortex
Low road - goes directly to the nearby amygdala. It enables amygdala to receive direct input from the senses and generate emotional reaction before the cerebral cortex has had time to to interpret what is causing the reaction. (seeing a rope that you may think is a snake, only to realise later that it wasn’t) (survival - birds and reptiles.)
Cerebral cortex
- Receives sensory input from thalamus and processes it as perceptions and interpretations.
- Activations of emotions by cognitive processes (Consciousness)
- Sensory impulses to the neocortex for cognitive processing.
Amygdala
Functions as an early warning sign for threatening social stimuli.
Dual system for emotional processing
Feeling a strong emotion without understanding why:
Not all emotional responses register at the cortex.
People can have two simultaneous but different emotional reactions to the same event.
A conscious one occurring as a result of cortical activity.
An unconscious one triggered by the amygdala.
Eg. I don’t know why I came across as angry, I felt warm towards that person.
Brain activity involved in the regulation of emotional behaviour.
Prefrontal cortex - Seat of executive functions involving reasoning, decision making and control of impulsivity.
Deficits cause emotions to be expressed in an unregulated manner.
Neural structures involved in emotion operate biochemically
Dopamine and endorphin activity underlies pleasurable emotions.
Serotonin and norepinephrine - fear and anger.
Hemispheric activation and emotion.
Electric shock treatment:
Left hemisphere knocked out, right hemisphere took over: Wailing and crying until shock wore off.
Left hemisphere: unconcerned, happy, euphoric.
Left and right hemisphere activation EEG Frontal lobe activity
Left hemisphere active when: happy film or pleasurable experience.
Right hemisphere: Sadness or watching a disgusting film.
EEG right hemisphere activity
May be a risk factory for adult depressive disorder.
Automatic and hormonal processes.
Fight or flight response.
Produced by the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system and by hormones from the endocrine system.
Stimulates organs and muscles.
Endocrine system - pumps epinephrine, cortisol and stress hormones into the bloodstream.
Hormones - physiological effect, similar to those in sympathetic nervous system, but last longer.
Expressive behaviours are:
The person’s observable emotional displays. Angry, sad, fearful, happy.
Empathy is:
Others emotion evoking similar responses.
Emotional displays: Charles Darwin
Are products of evolution because they contribute to a species survival. Animals and humans show teeth when they are angry.
Fundamental emotional patterns are
Innate emotional reactions, are wired into the nervous system.
The evolutionary view does not:
All emotional expressions are innate. Cannot be modified or inhibited by social learning.
FACS (Facial Action Coding System)
Study of facial expressions.
Instrumental behaviours are:
Directed at achieving some emotional-relevant goal. Searching for ways to evoke love from your partner.
The relationship between performance and arousal
Depends not only on arousal, but how complicated the task is.
The more complex the task is, the lower the optimal arousal level.
Moderate level of arousal can disrupt performance.
Emotions are:
Feelings that involve eliciting stimuli, cognitive appraisals, physiological arousal, and expressive and instrumental behaviours.
Physiological responses in emotion are produced by:
The hypothalamus, the limbic system, the cortex, and the autonomic and endocrine systems.
The cognitive component of emotional experience involves:
The evaluative and personal appraisal of eliciting stimuli.
The behavioural component of emotion includes:
Expressive and instrumental behaviours.
Many emotions are common across all cultures but:
expression of emotion is also shaped by social learning.
There is an optimal level of arousal for the performance of any task altough:
it varies according to the task difficulty.
Cognitive appraisal - Lazarus believe
Cognition and affect are related.
Cognitive appraisal is required for determining emotional experience.
Cognition mediates emotional response
We feel angry or frightened because we are threatened.
Lazarus - Emotion follows the physiological state
We feel frightened because we are threatened.
Lazarus- Primary appraisal:
Emotions like anger, guilt and sadness. Arise when important goals are blocked.
Motivational relevance (related to personal commitments. Motivational congruence (consistent or not with personal goals).
Lazarus - Secondary appraisal:
Guilt involves high self-accountability, whereas anger is experienced when you hold other people accountable for your situation.
Accountability - who gets the blame or credit
Problem focused coping potential - can the situation be resolved.
Emotion focused coping potential - can the situation be handled psychologically
Future expectancy - Can the situation change or not.
Affective primacy - Zajonic
Cognition and emotion are separate, but they can interact.
Sometimes emotion happen so quickly that we aren’t aware of them, which affects our decisions and behaviours.
Experiment- Liking higher when prime face was happy. When prime is available, it can be discounted. Affective information is processed very quickly.
proposed a different model to the cognitive appraisal model proposed by Lazarus. In his model, he suggests that cognition and emotion are separate, but that they can interact. Affective primacy gives rise to the idea that sometimes our emotions happen so quickly and unconsciously that we aren’t aware of them affecting our decisions and behaviours. It is difficult to moderate appraisal of a situation if we are not aware of emotional experiences that affect our behaviour.
Appraisal theories and horror response
Those who had training in cognitive appraisal strategies experienced lower degrees of of horror.
Journal article:
Practice in general appraisal themes reflect seeing the bigger picture to fit specific auto and no autobiographical events, leads to benefits in terms of self reported emotions.
Bad things happen in the world:
I need to put it behind me and move on
Silver lining:
There are some good aspects to every situation
Broader perspective:
Bad events are rare overall, good things are happening all the time
Time heals:
In the future, this will not seem as bad as it does now.
Which emotions is the Amygdala responsible for
Associated with fear and is located towards the front of the temporal lobe.
The appraisal theory assumes:
Emotional responses are elicited as the organism evaluates the relevance of the environmental changes for its well-being.
Used top-down processes.
Appraisal theories assume that:
Appraisal is the most important determinant of emotional states.
Appraisal can occur automatically without conscious awareness.
Appraisal (Smith and Kirby)
Distinguished between appraisal:
On reasoning: involving deliberate thinking
On activation of memories:
Involving automatic processes.
Appraisal based on reasoning is slower and more flexible.
Findings for non-conscious emotional processing
Processing below the level of conscious awareness can produce emotional reactions.
Eg. Greater physiological responses to the phobic relevant pictures when unconsciously primed.
Affective blind sight
Emotional stimuli can be discriminated without conscious awareness.
Critically evaluate the notion of cognitive appraisal as applied to the models of emotion
Appraisal theories assume:
Emotional responses are elicited as the organism evaluates the relevance of environmental changes for its well-being.
Appraisal is the most important determinant of emotional states.
Kuppens: four appraisals: goal, obstacle, other accountability: someone to blame, fairness and control relevant to anger. No appraisal component is necessary. Some people feel angry without an appraisal.
Tong: Four negative emotions - Anger, sadness, fear, guilt. No single or combination of appraisals were necessary for any of the emotional states.
Many studies find it difficult as manipulated situations and appraisals make it hard to know participants reactions are directly affected by appraisals.
-Participants are presented with hypothetical situations so experience little genuine emotion.
-If appraisals cause emotions, appraisal judgement should be made faster.
Cognitive appraisal evaluation
- Cognitive appraisal often strongly influences emotional experience.
- Appraisal processes determine whether we experience emotion and influence which emotion is experienced.
- Individual differences in emotional experience can be partially explained by appraisals varying from person to person.
- Manipulating cognitive appraisals alters emotional experience and can have causal effects on emotion.
Limitations of the appraisal theory
- Situational appraisal is always crucial in determining emotional experience is too strong. They are only moderately predicted by their situational appraisals.
- Most research focuses on passive individuals. In the real world emotions emerge out of active social interaction. However, emotions can relate to the past or future.
- Focuses on emotional experienced determined by the current situation.
- Assumed theoretically that appraisals cause emotional experiences. Appraisals and emotions can blur into each other.
Primary appraisal:
- Motivational relevance (related to personal commitments).
- Motivation congruence (consistent or not with personal goals).
Primary appraisal:
- Motivational relevance (related to personal commitments).
- Motivation congruence (consistent or not with personal goals).
Secondary appraisal:
Accountability—who gets the blame and/or credit.
Problem-focused coping potential—can the situation be resolved?
Emotion-focused coping potential—can the situation be handled psychologically?
Future expectancy—will the situation change or not?
Secondary appraisal:
Accountability—who gets the blame and/or credit.
Problem-focused coping potential—can the situation be resolved?
Emotion-focused coping potential—can the situation be handled psychologically?
Future expectancy—will the situation change or not?
What are the primary appraisal?
In what situations do they arise?
Motivational Relevance
Motivation Congruence
Emotions like anger, guilt and sadness all have the same primary appraisals.
They arise in situations where important personal goals are blocked, but they differ on secondary appraisal
Similarly, anxiety involves low emotion focused coping potential, whereas sadness involves low expectancy of change.
Secondary appraisal
For instance, guilt involves high self-accountability, anger is experienced when you hold other people accountable for your situation.
Accountability:
Problem focused coping potential:
Emotion focused
Future expectancy
Guilt: my fault
Anger: Someone else’s fault
Anxiety:
Sadness:
Affective primacy
Robert Zajonc (1993)
Cognition and emotion are separate.
Study by Murphy and Zajonc (1993), they primed participants with photos of happy or angry faces.
The primes were either 4ms (very fast and certainly subliminal) or 1s (above threshold). Straight after the prime, a Japanese ideograph was shown to participants who were not Japanese, and participants were asked to rate how much they liked them.
Liking was higher when the prime was a happy face, and disliking was higher when the prime was an angry face (in the 4ms priming condition, and not in the 1s condition). This was interpreted as evidence that affective information is processed very quickly and automatically (compared with the ~50ms exposure required for semantic priming). Yet, when the prime is consciously available, it can be discounted (although ratings trended in the direction of the prime).
Appraisal theories and ‘horror’ response
In an experiment (Schartau, Dalgleish, & Dunn, 2009) scientists created a manipulated situation wherein participants would watch a horror movie and then record their emotional responses. Some participants were trained in the following cognitive strategies to help them with emotional appraisal:
Bad things happen—’bad things happen in the world, and I need to put them behind me and move on’.
Silver lining—’there are usually some good aspects to every situation, and it is important to focus on these’.
Broader perspective—’bad events are rare overall, and lots of good things are happening all of the time’.
Time heals—’in the (near) future, this will not seem anywhere near as bad as it does now’.
The experiment found that there was a big difference between how much horror distress and physiological distress participants experienced. Those who had had training in the cognitive appraisal strategies experienced lower degrees of horror than those who had no training.
What is the relationships between emotion and cognition proposed by Zajonc (1980) and by Lazarus (1982)
Zajonic:
Affective Priming -
Emotions happens quickly and unconsciously that we are not aware of them.
It is difficult to appraise when we are not aware of the emotions.
Cognition occurs prior to emotion.
Lararus:
Thought is a necessary condition of emotion.
Disassociated coping
Built on appraisal theory to develop cognitive -mediational theory. This theory still asserts that our emotions are determined by our appraisal of the stimulus, but it suggests that immediate, unconscious appraisals mediate between the stimulus and the emotional response.
Cognition and consciousness
Depending on how they are perceived, two different ideas of consciousness arise.
Consciousness: separate process. Different from a conscious module.
Cognitive processing must reach a certain threshold in order to achieve awareness.
According to Humphrey (1983, 2002), the main function of consciousness
Is social.
People need to manipulate and predict other people’s behaviour.
Humans develop conscious awareness of self which helps them to understand others.
Social nature of consciousness: The machinery that computes other people’s awareness.
Machinery is used to perceive awareness of ourselves.
This social machinery depends which part of the brain?
The temporo-parietal junction (where the temporal and parietal lobes meet). There is support for this view. For example, transcranial magnetic stimulation applied to this area impaired people’s ability to switch between representations of the self and those of another person
Out of body experience
A person’s conscious seems to become detached.
Free will
The ability to make choices and to determine one’s own outcomes free from constraints. Thinking of making a coffee and then doing it.
Thomas Huxley (1874) “steam whistle hypothesis”,
according to which conscious thought resembles the steam whistle on a train locomotive. The whistle tells us something about what is happening inside the engine but has no causal impact on the train’s movement.
Similarly - Wegner (2003) claimed we have only the illusion of conscious or free will. Our actions are actually caused by unconscious processes However, we mistakenly infer our actions are determined by our conscious intentions.
Wedgner
Actions are caused by conscious thoughts.
The principles of priority, consistency and exclusivity jointly lead us to believe our actions are caused by our conscious thoughts:
When a thought appears in consciousness just before an action (priority), is consistent with the action (consistency), and is not accompanied by conspicuous alternative causes of the action (exclusivity), we experience conscious will and ascribe authorship to ourselves for the action.
Gollwitzer (1999) focused on implementation intentions, which “specify:
The when, where, and how of responses leading to goal attainment”.
Gollwitzer assumed conscious implementation intentions create “instant habits”, making it much easier for us to achieve our goals (e.g., passing exams) and to avoid being distracted by irrelevant activities.
Intentions can influence behaviour.
However, the typically long delay between conscious manipulation of intentions and subsequent behaviour makes it hard to establish the precise causal factors.
Probability of our goals is reduced by our habits.
Part of the brain that makes decisions
Brain reading and free will
Pre-frontal cortex and parietal cortex were active 7 seconds before moving their index finger.
Brain activity was in the fronto-polar.
Problem: participants indicated when they had reached a conscious decision.
Overall evaluation
Some of our decisions are prepared pre-consciously before we are aware of them. However, we must be very cautious about accepting that conclusion for various reasons.
Narrow in scope
Artificial situations
Lamme (2010) argued that our actual conscious experience is often much richer than our report of that experience. Why is that?
According to Lamme, “You cannot know whether you have a conscious experience without resorting to cognitive functions such as attention, memory or inner speech.”
Reports of our conscious experience may be limited due to processes intervening between the experience and its report rather than limitations in the experience itself.
This view implies verbal reports of conscious experience may often be very inadequate.
Only access consciousness can be reported. Our belief that our conscious experience is richer than our reported experience occurs because phenomenal consciousness is more extensive than access consciousness.
Observers may exaggerate the richness of their conscious experience because what they claim to experience is influenced by their expectations as well as by the visual information presented to them.
Most people believe they have much richer conscious visual experience than they are able to report. It is likely (but not certain) that this richness is illusory and depends on the involvement of top-down processes (e.g., expectations).
Thus, individuals’ self-reports of their visual experience are more likely to involve misreporting than under-reporting.
Vegetative state in which there is
“wakefulness without conscious awareness”. The third stage is the minimally conscious state involving some evidence of consciousness
Three stages of degraded consciousness have been identified in brain-damaged patients.
The most severe stage is coma, in which there is no conscious awareness and no wakefulness. The next stage is the vegetative state in which there is “wakefulness without conscious awareness”. The third stage is the minimally conscious state involving some evidence of consciousness.
We have seen vegetative-state patients produce several cognitive processes generally thought to involve conscious awareness.
These processes include language comprehension, sustained attention, switching attention, use of imagery and question answering. In addition, patients showing the most neuroimaging evidence of consciousness generally greatest recovery thereafter.
Lamme argued that it may be preferable to define consciousness in neural rather than behavioural terms.
What does type of consciousness does he focus on?
He has focused on visual consciousness, that is, conscious experience of visual objects. Presentation of a visual stimulus leads to extremely rapid (essentially automatic) processing at successive levels of the visual cortex. This processing starts with early visual cortex and then proceeds to higher levels. This fast “feedforward sweep” is completed within about 100– 150 ms.
What is the feedforward sweep followed by?
A recurrent processing. .
Relevance to the conscious experience very direct.
recurrent processing is accompanied by conscious experience, while the feedforward sweep is not.
What is recurrent processing?
Recurrent processing (a form of top-down processing) involves feedback from higher to lower brain areas producing extensive interactions among different areas. It is a conscious experience.
Masking
Suppression of the processing (and conscious perception of) a stimulus by presenting a second, masking stimulus very shortly thereafter.
How can we prevent (or reduce) recurrent processing so as to assess its importance for conscious perception?
Masking
How else can recurrent processing be reduced?
Another method is to use transcranial magnetic stimulation.
TMS can be applied to early visual cortex sufficiently long after stimulus presentation to ensure it disrupts recurrent processing rather than the feedforward sweep.
Fahrenfort et al.’s (2007) findings were correlational.
Visual task.
Recurrent processing is not essential for visual processing.
V1/V2 -
Some evidence suggests conscious visual perception can occur without recurrent processing provided the visual task is easy.
There is much support for the notion that conscious visual perception is generally associated with the presence of recurrent processing. FeedAnimals Nonanimals forward processing in the absence of recurrent processing typically does not lead to conscious perception. In principle, then, recurrent processing could be regarded as a neural index or marker of consciousness.
What are the limitations?
Focus in on visual consciousness.
Little is know about past or future events.
Recurrent processing may not be necessary for conscious perception if the visual task is sufficiently easy.
There are circumstances (e.g., inattention) in which recurrent processing is not sufficient for conscious awareness.
Recurrent processing appears to be a useful measure largely because it typically correlates highly with self-report and other behavioural measures of consciousness.
