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COGNITION AND EMOTION :PENCIL2: P+C2 LECTURE 5 - Coggle Diagram
COGNITION AND EMOTION
:PENCIL2:
P+C2 LECTURE 5
Cognition
Cognitive psychology is great for understanding memory and attention etc.
Cognitive theories often ignore emotion when explaining basic systems such as memory.
Computer-models.
Emotion
Our cognition occurs in a biological and emotional context.
Evolutionary constraints such as survival and reproduction.
A critical aspect of biological systems is emotion and motivation.
Rewarded with feelings of joy at the prospect of passing on our genes in reproduction. (evolutionary?)
Same goes for feelings of grief when a loved one passes.
-Emotions vary in strength, can be infrequent and strong (e.g. joy of a child being born or grief of losing a loved one) or frequent and less strong (e.g. everyday feelings)
Why do we have emotions?
Emotions help orient our lives towards goals.
Monitor and adjust behaviour.
Emotions provide meaning to life.
Emotions are related to mental health
Overwhelming negative emotions can lead to life feeling miserable and not worth living (e..g depression)
Monitoring current state
Happy
: Current goals are being achieved so continue.
Sad
: Current plan has failed, so consider a new one.
Anxious
: Self-preservation is threatened. Monitor the environment for threats.
Angry
: Resources threatened, social deception (cheating). Defend resources, punish.
Disgust
: Off food, so reject substance and withdraw (adaptive strategy). Also moral disgust.
Defining emotion
Emotions are difficult to define...
Three main aspects:
Cognitive component of conscious experience (e.g. “I feel…”)
Overt expression of internal state (facial expression and body language)
Physiological experience (e.g. heart rate, sweating, breathing rate, flushed face and neck)
Elkman (1993)
Defining emotions by what we can recognise in other facial expressions.
Core emotions
Social element
of defining emotions by accurately recognising facial expressions.
Although feelings such as fear and anxiety can be negative internally, it can be beneficial to display these feelings on the outside to increase the likelihood of someone coming to our aid in a social setting.
Facial Expressions
Cross-cultural similarity
Papua New Guinea vs. Americans
Asked “what does your face look like when you are happy / sad / disgusted?”
Evidence that emotion is a basic biological process
Both athletes are showing the same expression of sadness.
Blind athlete has never seen someone else's facial expressions displaying sadness, yet she still displays sadness in the same way as sighted people who have been exposed to others' facial expressions previously.
Suggests a biological basis, not a learned behaviour.
Are emotions human?
No - animals
Dogs cry when owners leave
My dog wags his tail when he sees me over FaceTime and displays happiness and excitement.
Body Language
No ambiguity in some cases, very clear what emotion is being displayed.
Even when you exclude the face, the same emotions can still be inferred.
Gender differences
Who is angrier? Who is sadder?
Research has found that people tend to attribute sadness to the woman and anger to the man.
Merged faces of people asked to display sadness and then anger.
Expressions of emotions
Important for social interactions.
Have an evolutionary basis.
Allows us to infer how others are feeling, and what they may be thinking or feeling about us.
Relevant to approaching / avoiding others.
Significant for attracting friends and intimate partners.
Avoiding dangerous / grumpy other people.
Physiological component
Autonomic arousal
Emotions are usually accompanied by arousal of the autonomic nervous system.
Imagine your car spins out of control on an icy road… your body comes to life.
Your heart rate, breathing and blood pressure increase, pupils dilate, start sweating.
Release of adrenal hormones throughout the body to prepare for Fight or Flight.
Polygraph test
The polygraph does
not
detect lies.
It measures indicators of autonomic reactions to inhibiting the truth (e.g. sweating)
Most people find lying stressful.
Galvanic skin response (GSR)
Skin conductance response (SCR)
Theories of emotion
James-Lange Theory
Stimulus --> Autonomic Response --> Experience of Fear
Autonomic Responses = HR increase, Respiration, Blood pressure, Action (e.g. running, etc.)
There is evidence that feedback from your body (e.g. autonomic response + how you feel) subsequently feeds into the cognitive awareness system (e.g. we feel happy because we are smiling, and confident because we are standing in a power pose)
Fake it til you make it (embodied account of emotion)
Evidence...
Strack & Stepper (1988)
People think that jokes are funnier when smiling already
Wood et al. (2015)
Some recent studies have found evidence that using a gel mask that restricts movement can suppress emotions (both positive and negative).
APPLICATION:
Some comedians will wait until their audience is already laughing before they tell their big joke for the night (e.g. by telling smaller jokes first)
Wollmer et al. (2012)
Botox
Inhibiting the movement of muscles associated with worry / anxiety can reduce feelings of depression.
Knocks out the corrugator muscle in the head and stops you from being able to frown.
Beta blockers for anxiety function in a similar way
Beta-blockers
Function by suppressing signals from the body (e.g. adrenaline), reduce anxiety by reducing the autonomic arousal associated with anxiety.
If you’ve felt anxious before, you can feel a pounding heart, tight chest, hard to breathe or you breathe too much, cold clammy hands, sweating.
Beta blockers (that help people) support the James-Lange theory of emotions.
Suggest that it is the physiological autonomic response which first feeds into the conscious experience of emotions.
Summary...
There is evidence that the emotional properties of a stimulus can be computed rapidly prior to awareness, and the amygdala plays a key role in this.
However, the autonomic response can be ambiguous; is it fear, excitement, or exercise?
Therefore this theory can’t by itself explain emotion.
Cannon-Bard Theory
Argued emotion can be experienced independently of body states such as autonomic responses.
Autonomic responses can be ambiguous and slower than the experienced emotion.
They argued there is experience of fear and this activates autonomic responses.
Bridges
Dutton & Aron (1974)
The scary rope bridge triggers an autonomic response - the second, less-scary, Millenium bridge does not.
Participants asked questions by a confederate ‘researcher’, who was very attractive.
The dependent variable (thing they are measuring) was whether the participant returned the phone call to the experimenter or not (asked if they wanted to talk again to discuss elements of the study)
Autonomic response of being on the scary bridge made people more likely to call the confederate researcher back, as they associated that person with the feelings of excitement and thrill that they experienced on the bridge.
Brain structures and emotion
Amygdala
Receives rapid visual info from the thalamus
Fight or flight
More primitive part of the brain
Encoding of stimuli (e.g. threat) often subconscious and faster than conscious processing.
In monkeys, bilateral lesions of the
amygdala
result in
Kluver-Bucy syndrome.
An unusual tameness and blunting of emotional reactions + impaired learning from emotional stimuli
Calder et al. (1996)
In humans,
lesions to the amygdala
mostly
impair the recognition of fear
in other faces with some deficit of other emotions such as anger and distrust.
Support for James-Lange theory
Rapid and autonomic route to the amygdala
Detects threat prior to conscious awareness for rapid life saving responses.
Prior to awareness and action.
Support for Cannon-Bard theory
Processing to visual cortex = slower and conscious awareness.
Cortex provides context for the emotional reactions.
Orbitofrontal cortex
Coricelli et al. (2005)
Computes the current motivational value of
rewards
.
This can change (e.g. chocolate)
It is also associated with the emotion of
regret
.
When we make a choice and the reward is less than we hoped.
Anterior cingulate cortex
Processing emotional aspects of pain.
Pain can override cognition.
Empathy - activates when others are in pain
Involved in detecting errors which evoke negative emotions (such as anger and frustration) so as to avoid errors in the future.
Activates when we are in emotional conflict.
Insula - Disgust
Involved in processing emotional aspects of disgust - essential for survival in avoiding poison and dangerous food etc.
E.g. spoiled milk
Empathy - activates when others are disgusted.
Involved in our bodily sensations (e.g. feeling itchy, feeling sad, feeling happy)
Insula and expression perception
Kipps et al. (2007)
Patients with
Huntinton’s disease
have deficits in recognising expressions of disgust and this is related to the amount of insula damage.
Insula and social cognition
We can also be disgusted by people such as drug addicts and the homeless.
Increased insula activation.
Reduced social cognition (
medial prefrontal cortex
)
Ventral Striatum - Dopamine pathway
Stimulating ventral striatum associated with pleasure and reward.
Part of the dopamine network.
Sex, drugs and rock n roll.