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.
