Emotions, Aggression, and Stress Flashcards
Final Exam
What is an emotion?
- Subjective mental state usually accompanied by distinctive behaviors, feelings, and involuntary physiological changes (ex. rapid heartbeat, tears, blush caused by autonomic nervous sytem)
What do emotions facilitate?
Social contact and learning
How many core emotions are there?
there are 6-8 core sets of emotions w various degrees of intensity
What are the high level of intensity emotions?
Ectasy, adoration, terror, amazement, grief, loathing, rage, and vigilance
What are the medium level of intensity emotions?
Joy, affection, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, expectation
What are the low level intensity of emotions?
Happiness, regard, apprehension, distraction, pensiveness, boredom, annoyance, alertness
How is emotion communicated?
- through verbal communication (words, tone of voice)
- and non-verbal communications (body language, facial expressions)
What is the purpose of facial expressions?
Facial expressions provide emphasis and context for verbal communication to your audience
Do people around the world agree on human emotions?
- There are both biological and cultural influences but there is agreement about the meaning of most facial expressions
- Happiness is the most agreed upon emotion
- Non-literate isolated groups had trouble with disgust and surprise recognition
Individual variability
What percentage of infants had low and high reactivity?
- Reactivity was measured in 4 month old infants
- Low reactivity seen in around 40% of infants
- High reactivity seen in around 20% of infants
Individual variability
What are high reactive children biased to become?
- timid, shy, cautious in unfamiliar situations (risk averse)
- greater risk for anxiety disorders
- exaggerated amygdala response
Individual variability
What are low reactive children biased to become?
outgoing, spontaneous, and fearless
What is intra-cranial self stimulation?
- A type of operant conditioning where stimulation of certain brain region may be reinforcing or aversive
- Reinforcement may or may not correlate with subjective pleasure
How is the medial forebrain bundle related to emotions?
- Positive emotion is elicited by stimulating the medial forebrain bundle (anials will work hard to recieve mild stimulation here)
- The VTA area releases dopamine into the nucleus accumbens
- Researchers have proposed that drugs of abuse are addictive because they activated these same neural circuits with an artificial intensity
Papez circuit-limbic system
What does stimulating the limbic system elicit?
negative emotion
Papez circuit/limbic system
What happens when you lesion an overactive amygdala?
- increased social affiliation
- decreased anxiety
- increased confidence
What is the central amygdala a hub for?
anxiety, stress, fear, and addiction
What causes kluver-bucy syndrome and what are the symptoms?
- Caused by lessions/removal of portions of temporal lobes (esp amygdala and hippocampus)
- Symptoms include: dramatically lessened fear and aggression, blunted affect (decreased ability to express emotion), hyperorality, hypersexuality, and visual agnosia (inability to recognize or interpret visual info)
What were patient S.M’s symptoms?
- developed fearlessness in childhood
- outgoing, but few good friends
- confronts risk
- normal nervous system responses
- unafraid of spiders/snakes
- little social fear or sense of personal space
- no (or very low) normal sympathetic nervous system response to nromally fear-evoking stimuli
What does the amygdala “low road” do?
- direct projection from the thalamus to the amygdala
- bypasses conscious processing and allows for immediate emotional reactions to stimuli
What does the amygdala “high road” do?
- routes incoming info through sensory cortex, allowsing for processing that is slower, but is also conscious, fine-grained, and integrated with higher-level cognitive processes (like memory)
- contributions from prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate offer an additional level of fear conditioning called observational fear learning (when fear of potentially harmful stimuli is learned through social transmission)
What detects external threats?
the amygdala