Cognition and emotion Flashcards
(17 cards)
YERKES-DODSON LAW
One of the functions of emotions is to mobilize physiological resources. Y-D law suggests that appropriate levels of arousal are needed to attain the optimal level of performance
OATLEY & JOHNSON-LAIRD
Emotions evolved to signal that ongoing behaviour should be interrupted to take account of conflicting goal. Events happen and as a consequence priorities will need to set and reset - cognitive readjustment to emotional events. i.e. sadness following bereavement is seen as initiating readjustment of life goals that included the lost one. The mechanism behind these changes is not well understood.
DAMASIO
Gambling task - participants tend to use 2 decks of cards that result in moderate gain in a gambling task, rather than 2 that might result in a big win or a big loss, when they are not sure why they won or lost (not sure about the rules). The same applies in life, people act on hunches, not full understanding. According to D. emotional responses to winning & losing produce physiological changes - somatic markers - represent ‘gut feelings’ often used to guide our decisions. Thus the function of emotion is centred around information (via bodily feedback/conditioning) and future choices.
STATE VS TRAIT EMOTION
State emotion is how you feel right now - very changeable
Trait emotion - more stable personality characteristics, enduring personality features
Mood Congruent Memory
MCM - (Bower) part. were induced into happy or sad mood with hypnosis & then read happy or sad stories. They were then given a surprise recall task. More was recalled from the story that matched the mood of the participants. It sparked a field of research into effects of emotional disorders on cognitive processing. It was also found that most people, in no particular mood, had a positive bias towards memory for positive information. Clinically depressed patients on the other hand show mood congruent mem. effects (it might be however because they did have more negative experiences). It has been suggested that MCM might keep a person depressed, therefore treatment includes trying to change this cognitive bias.
MOOD DEPENDANT MEMORY
Recall of a stimulus or event is enhanced if the mood at recall matches that from experiencing the event. Experimentally tested via mood induction (hypnosis, music or text). Bower used hypnosis induction. Part. learned two lists of words A & B. They were put into happy or sad mood before the task - one mood for each list. They were then tested for free recall of one of the first list. The mood during recall either matched that at learning, or not. Not testing list B - learning list B was an interference task, making the experiment more sensitive to benefitial or detrimental effects of mood manipulations.
Bower proposed an influential semantic network theory to explain these mood and memory effects. Emotions could be represented as nodes in a network, connected to other semantically related items. Activation of a node spreads selectively across network to the connected units. Some connections are inhibitory, so sadness node would inhibit a happiness node. Therefore when trying to remember a list of words in one mood, spreading activation from the associated emotion node will enhance recalling that info in that same mood.It was later found that this is not a very robust effect and is influenced by factors such as the strength of th mood state that is induced, the nature of items to be recalled. The phenomenon could be genuine, but the problem could lie with the method used to measure and detect it.
MACLEOD ET AL
Emotional Stroop task used to test anxiety-related attentional bias using dot probe (or attentional probe). Participants are high trait anxious individuals. The task is to respond aqap to the presentation of a dot (probe, because it probes where attention is located). On some trials there was no dot to check part. are looking for it, and not simply responding as soon as the word disappears. Before the dot, two words appear together, one neutral, one threatening. If part. are consistently faster at finding the dot when it appears where the threatening word was, then it is assumed they were attending to that, rather than the neutral item. Anxious part. were faster on probes appearing where threat words were, unlike the controls. This bias is seen with different types of material (words, pictures, faces) but most prominent when material matches the current concerns of the individual.
MATTHEWS
Suggested that a vicious circle of attending to potential threats in the environment maintains the anxious mood. The idea that anxious people are constantly vigilant for possible threat is popular in theorizing about clinical anxiety.
MATHEWS & MACLEOD
Induced a positive or negative bias in part. using specialized training procedures, & then assessed its effects on anxiety levels. An induced positive bias reduced anxiety levels whilst exposed to a moderately stressful situation, the other way round for negative bias. Thus attentional bias has a causal effect on anxiety. Performance of non-anxious controls (with no mood induction) suggests a protective bias, which might mean avoidance of minor threats.
SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION
Another cognitive process affected by emotions. Using homophones (‘pane’ & ‘pain’ or ‘dye’ & ‘die’), Eysenck asked part. to write them down as they heard them. The higher the trait anxiety in part., the more threat spellings they produced. This suggests that trait anxiety was linked to interpreting ambiguous stimulus in a negative way - interpretative bias.
Richard & French used homographs, words which are written the same but can have different meanings. Did a priming experiment, a lexical decision task with a prime related to the target word. Results showed that highly anxious patients show a negative bias in interpretation measured by faster response time to pairs such as batter-assault, than batter-pancake. For non-anxious part. there is a positive bias toward non-threatening meaning.
JAMES-LANGE theory
View that emotions arise from physiological reactions in the body. Based on observing reactions to frightening situations, where behaviour was initiated too rapidly to have arisen from feeling of fear translated into conscious decision to act.
CANNON-BARD theory
Physiological reactions very similar across most emotions, might even arise from fever and illness. Given the common physiology, it is the pattern of cortical stimulation that distinguishes one emotion from another. So you don’t have to cry to feel sad - there has to be appropriate stimulation of thalamus. For James-Lang theory preventing crying would prevent sadness. In support of C-B, people with damaged spinal cords, which prevents normal physiological responses, still reacted emotionally. In support of J-L, the emotional response was blunted
SCHACHTER-SINGER theory
Like James - physiological mechanisms were crucial, like Cannon - the responses were non specific & could not distinguish between different emotions. They proposed that’s it’s individual interpretation of why those physiological responses were occurring that differentiated between emotions. Context, previous experience, expectations and knowledge of the world all facilitated this interpretation.
To test this, they injected part. with adrenaline (hormone related to arousal of nervious system). Some were told it would not have any effect on them, some - it would make their heart race. The latter group did not report any emotional experience, the former did. Because they didn’t expect any physiological reaction, but reported emotional experience - supports James-Lange theory - the physiology led to experiencing emotion. Why didn’t the other group report any emotional reaction?
Then part. who experienced emotion were put in a room with a happy or angry stooge. The behaviour of the stooge affected feelings of those part.Therefore context influences specific emotions. They interpreted the results as supportive of their theory - non-specific physiological arousal interacted with the social and physical context to determine the precise emotion part. felt. They showed that identitac physiological states could be subjectively experienced as different emotions (appraisal).
KLAUS SCHERER
Modern appraisal theory. There is a fixed set of criteria that we use when making appraisals in every situtation, such as how novel or agreeable it is, how it complies with our personal goals and needs. Neutral event is unlikely to generate any emotion. How do we run through all the criteria before feeling the emotion though? could be not conscious, non-serial but automatic and parallel process. Because of the method used to invesitgate it, self -reports, it’s heavily criticised. Using self-reports means part. can’t report unconscious appraisals. Maybe brain-imaging technologies will be able to access automatic evaluations?
ZAJONC
Participated in the “primacy debate” what comes first, cognition or emotion. He disagreed with appraisal theory that emotion produces cognition. Appraisal in his view is not necessary for emotion to arise - similar to James-Lange. The experience of emotion precedes cognition of that emotion.
Experiment using mere exposure effect - the finding that people tend to prefer items to which they have been previously exposed, rather than novel items. Zajonc presented the items subliminaly, there was no conscious perception, while participants where busy with another task. Part., even thuogh showed no recognition of the items, gave them higher preference ratings. Zajonc argued that cognition is not necessary to have an affective experience. he was assuming that the items were not processed cognitively. Secondly he assumed preference ratings are comparable to emotional experience. However, not all cognitive processing must be conscious, and equating preference rating to an emotion is a bit of exaggeration.
LAZARUS
He argued essentialism of cognitive appraisals for emotions. In his studies he would typically induce emotions in part. by showing them anxiety-provoking films. At the same time there was a soundtrack played to them: a denial one (they are actors, they don’t really feel the pain etc) and an intellectual one (this is a strange native custom), manipulating the appraisal. in one condition there was no soundtrack. Physiological measures taken during the film showed that the soundtrack did reduce emotional responses significantly, compared to no soundtrack condition. This does not prove cognition precedes affect, but shows it can significantly alter emotional response.
LeDoux
Studies of lesioned animals, where specific neural pathways were severed on purpose. Using different tasks and manipulating emotions, he showed that certain brain structures (thalamus and amygdala) play different roles in generation of emotion. He showed that learning about new fearful situations or altering existing knowledge about fear (according to the outcome of cognitive appraisals) requires more complex route, where areas such as the cortex is involved. immediate response to emotionally significant stimulus takes the lower route, bypassing the cortex - no need for time-consumng higher processing (important in replying to fear, where it’s potentially life-saving, what about other emotions?). The low, quick and easy route could support Zajonc’s idea of direct elicitation of emotion, no cognition. High route - Lazarus’s that cognitive processing can influence, if not precede, emotion
