Week 9 - Social and Emotional Brain Flashcards
1
Q
What is emotion?
A
- Emotion – reaction to an event that includes a combination of strong feelings, behavioural dispositions and physiological responses.
2
Q
What are the two psychological classifications of emotion?
A
- Categorical vs. dimensional theories of Emotion:
- Categorical theories - each emotion is distinct (qualitatively different from each other), e.g. fear is qualitatively different from sadness.
- Dimensional theories - different emotions lie in different points in 2-3 dimensions (the difference is quantitative)
3
Q
What is Ekman’s 1992 theory of six basic emotions?
A
- Theory of six basic emotions (Ekman, 1992) – thought these emotions were different from each other because they produce different facial expressions:
- Fear
- Sadness
- Anger
- Surprise
- Disgust
- Happiness
- Basic emotions:
- Innate
- Evolutionary old
- Shared among animals
- Facial expressions
- Universally recognised
- Paul Ekman and Friesen (1976) investigated whether a small set of ‘basic’ emotions is universally recognized:
- ‘Pictures of facial affect’ created by asking models to move facial muscles in specified ways.
- All facial expressions recognised at above-chance levels in all cultures, using forced-choice responses.
- Ekman (1972) - facial expressions posed by members of the Fore community in New Guinea in response to the stories:
- “Your friend has come, and you are happy”
- “Your child has died”
- “You are angry and about to fight”
- “You see a dead pig that has been lying there a long time”
4
Q
What is Russell’s 1980 circumplex model of affect?
A
- Each emotion as a point in 2-D space:
- Valence (Positive-Negative)
- Arousal (High-Low)
- Russell (1980) circumplex model of affect - ask participants to rate words such as “Happy,” “Sleepy,” “Afraid,” “Sad” etc. on ordinal scale of valance and arousal
5
Q
Outline James-Lange Feedback Theory of Emotion (late 19th Century)
A
James-Lange Feedback theory (late 19th century):
- Stimulus directly causes a bodily reaction, which in turn produces an emotional experience, e.g. we feel happy because we smile
- Deterministic relationship between bodily reactions and emotions – one-to-one relationship between bodily reactions and emotions.
- No emotions are felt in absence of bodily reactions
- For example:
- Happy – smile
- Run away = Fear
- Strack et al. (1988) - participants were asked to rate several cartoons (not at all funny [0] to very funny [9]):
- Funniness ratings were higher for the Teeth condition (hold a pen with teeth) than the Lips condition (hold a pen with lips)
- Smile –> feeling happy
6
Q
Outline Cannon-Bard’s Theory of Emotion (1920s)
A
- Cannon-Bard theory (1920s)*:
- Challenge and alternative to James-Lange theory:
- Bodily responses are too undifferentiated – we cry when we are sad AND when we are happy
- Bodily responses are too slow to be a source of emotional feeling – when we feel fear we sweat, but this is slow
- Hormonal injection failed to generate emotions (norepinephrine & fear)
- A stimulus SIMULTANEOUSLY triggers activity in the autonomic nervous system and emotional experience – feeling and body response happen at the same time.
- Cannon-Bard thought Thalamus and hypothalamus play key roles in mediating emotion
- Looked at the Sham Rage expression in a cat:
- Removing a region that involved the thalamus and hypothalamus resulting in no sham rage
- Removing a region that did not involve the thalamus and hypothalamus resulted in sham rage remaining.
7
Q
Outline the Limbic System Theory of Emotion
A
- Papez (1937) hypothesised that a neural circuit controls our emotions. Key regions of his circuit included cingulate cortex, hippocampus, and anterior thalamus and hypothalamus.
- In a series of studies from the 1940s to the 1970s, MacLean extended Papez’ ideas to include the amygdala and parts of frontal cortex (orbitofrontal cortex) in an extended ‘limbic system.’
- Not entirely accurate
8
Q
How does Kluver-Blucy syndrome affect a monkey?
A
- The Klüver-Bucy syndrome (1939) - removing temporal lobes (including hippocampus, amygdala) in the rhesus monkey. Monkey symptoms:
- Loss of fear
- Hypersexuality
- hyperorality (tendency or compulsion to examine objects by mouth)
- altered food preferences
9
Q
How is the amygdala important for fear learning?
A
- Amygdala is important for Fear Learning:
- Pavlov’s dog experiment (classical conditioning)
- Fear learning (or fear conditioning) = classical conditioning using an aversive stimulus. Instead of reward they use an aversive stimulus.
- Results from Mice Studies (Late 1970s and early 80s):
- Lesions of amygdala disrupt fear conditioning
- Lesions of amygdala after conditioning also disrupt storage of response
- Amygdala is important for both forming stimulus associations (learning) and for subsequently expressing learned behavioural responses.
10
Q
Outline the case of SM who had Urbach-Wiethe disease
A
Adolphs et al. (1994) - Case SM who had Urbach-Wiethe disease:
- Bilateral amygdala damage.
- Rare recessive genetic disorder
- About 50–75% of the diagnosed cases of Urbach– Wiethe disease show bilateral symmetrical calcifications on the medial temporal lobes.
- SM was asked to rate intensity of each emotion in facial expressions.
- Abnormal ratings of fear.
- Note that some other emotions (especially anger) were not entirely normal, but fear was the worst affected.
- Feinstein et al. (2011) – patient SM:
- Bilateral amygdala damage.
- Multiple examples of lack of fear in laboratory tests and in everyday life.
- held up at knife point and at gun point
- physically accosted by a woman twice her size
- nearly killed in an act of domestic violence
- explicitly threatened with death many times
- Not fearful of anything – makes mistakes categorising fear again and again
11
Q
A
12
Q
How does functional brain imaging studies show fear?
A
Functional brain imaging studies (Calder, Lawrence & Young, 2001) – fear. For facial expressions, the techniques involve:
- Comparing blood flow between fear and neutral expressions
- OR measuring how blood flow changes as the fear expression becomes more intense.
- Differences shown in amygdala activation.
13
Q
How is disgust related to the insula?
A
- For facial expressions, the techniques mostly involve comparing blood flow between disgust and neutral expressions.
- The participant is not usually asked about the expression.
Calder, Lawrence & Young (2001):
- Insula and putamen activated for disgust.
Calder et al. (2000) - disgust recognition and experience - patient NK:
- Left-sided lesion involving the insula and putamen.
- Impaired recognition of disgust from face, voice or posture.
- Reduced experience of disgust in responses to disgust-provoking scenarios (e.g., maggots on rotten meat)
14
Q
What are the two accounts for the brain basis of emotion?
A
- Locationist account:
- Each emotional state is biologically basic and inherited, and cannot be broken down into more basic psychological components
- Discrete emotion categories (e.g., fear, anger) are consistently and specifically localised to discrete brain locales or anatomical networks (i.e., one-to-one mapping between brain region and emotion)
- Psychological constructionist account:
- Emotions are psychological events that emerge out of more basic psychological operations that are not specific to emotion
- Some brain regions are commonly activated by different emotions
15
Q
What account does the evidence support?
A
Past emotion studies appear to support the locationist account view. However, a more recent meta-analysis supports the psychological constructionist account:
- Lindquist et al. (2012) – meta analysis of emotion:
- First they tested the popular locationist view (Panksepp, 1998):
- Meta-analysis included a total of 234 neuroimaging studies (fMRI and PET) on emotion:
- A wide range of emotions caused activation in areas like the amygdala – not specific to fear.
- Disgust didn’t cause a huge activation in the insula compared to other emotions.
- Is any single region specific to a single category of emotion? No (i.e., evidence against the locationist account)
- Locationist account is too simplistic (no simple one-to-one relationship)
- Lindquist et al. (2012) found:
- Regions that were consistently activated across all emotion neuroimaging studies
- These are brain regions related to emotions in general
- Supports constructionist approach
17
Q
What is the role of dACC in social and emotional processes?
A
- dACC important for processing pain and empathy (empathy for pain), social pain (social rejection)
- Empathy - the capacity to comprehend and resonate with another’s emotional experience, which leads to a sharing of that person’s feelings.
19
Q
What did Singer’s extra study show about the affective link between empathy and pain?
A
Singer at al. (2006) did another study on empathy and pain but with Affective link manipulation:
- Before entering an fMRI scanner, each participant met two confederates and played an economic game (sequential Prisoner’s dilemma game) with each of them
- One of them played the game fairly, while the other played unfairly
- Results showed that brain empathic responses are modulated by the affective link between individuals
- Men show less empathic response to unfair players compared to women
- Nucleus accumbens (ventral striatum), a part of reward network, was activated only in men when unfair person gets electric stimulation.
