Emotion and cognition

Question 1

effects of emotion on cognition

Answer 1

1. emotional stimuli elicit automatic responses and grab attention
2. critical for survival and reproductive success so prioritised
3. “preparedness” evolved to fear phobic stimuli in natural world but not modern dangers

Question 2

conscious emotions can influence behaviour

Answer 2

1. Winkelman et al - study showed Ps an emotional face for 1/16th of a second so not aware they’d seen it, then a neutral face for longer and Ps had to say whether it was male or female
2. told it was a marketing study, so after they were asked to pour as much of a drink they’d like and say whether they liked it
3. those who were shown a happy face poured more of the drink and consumed more compared to a neutral or angry face

Question 3

unconscious priming of behaviour

Answer 3

John Bargh and colleagues at Yale have demonstrated lots of effects of unconscious primes on behaviour and decisionmaking

Question 4

cognitive bias towards emotional stimuli

Answer 4

1. classic tests from cognitive psychology have been widely used to demonstrate the influence of emotional stimuli on attention, memory and decision making
2. these tests are frequently used in clinical psychology research to assess the role of cognitive biases in the development and maintenance of disorders
3. some are now being adapted to treatments to modify cognitive biases

Question 5

attention

Answer 5

a process by which specific stimuli within the external and internal environment are selected for further processing

Question 6

paradigms to assess attentional bias

Answer 6

1. selective allocation of attention to disorder-related stimuli over neutral
2. detection tasks - if an individual is prone to attending more to a particular type of stimulus, he/she should detect it master if it is located amongst distractors
3. visual search task - normally for emotional biases, reaction time for finding a sad face/happy face
4. emotional stroop task - the instruction is reading out the colour they’re printed not what they state, compare reaction time when word content is neutral or related to disorder
5. difficulties interpreting the stroop - usually reflects attention bias but disorder relevant words may induce internal attention, may reduce emotional reaction that slows response, cognitive avoidance
6. dot probe task - attention directed to middle, two words and then a dot, have to say whether dot is up or down, not clear whether its engagement bias or disengagement bias
7. modified APT - can distinguish between engagement and disengagement biases, a cue stimulus is presented before and after pairs of target stimuli

Question 7

attentional bias

Answer 7

1. a systematic tendency to attend to a particular type of stimulus over others
2. suggested to be an underlying process involved in a range of disorders
3. anxiety disorders - reliable evidence of a bias for threatening information for subliminal and supraliminal stimuli, eye tracking suggests increased vigilance for threat and slower disengagement
4. depression - bias and greater lingering of attention on sad stimuli, eye tracking shows maintenance of gaze on negative stimuli and less on positive stimuli

Question 8

what happens in the brain

Answer 8

1. emotional stimuli cause early neuronal responses prior to identification, prefrontal
2. emotional stimuli cause increased functional connectivity between amygdala and visual cortex
3. amygdala lesions abolish bias for emotional words
4. emotional stimuli can bias competition for processing resources
5. emotion, like attention, increases visual cortex responses

Question 9

key mechanisms - memory

Answer 9

1. three stages of processing - encoding, storage and retrieval
2. each stage may be relevant to development of psychopathology
3. a number of factors influence what is encoded and retrieved
4. demonstrates attention and memory interact

Question 10

enhanced memory for positive and negative scenes

Answer 10

1. associated with amygdala activity during encoding
2. amygdala damage reverses memory bias for emotional>neutral
3. retrieval of autobiographical memories - 9/11 vs summer before, amygdala response seen in those close to the world trade centre

Question 11

can fear memories be erased

Answer 11

1. it would sometimes be helpful to alter disturbing memories
2. research suggests that memories can be modified by blocking their reconsolidation, which requires protein synthesis in the amygdala

Question 12

model of antidepressant action

Answer 12

1. antidepressants reduce emotional brain responses - reduced depression
2. ketamine acting as an antidepressant

Question 13

selective memory

Answer 13

1. mood congruent memory - the selective encoding or retrieval that occurs while individuals are a mood state consistent with the affective value of the material
2. hypothesised to be a factor in maintenance of depression - as more depressed, recall more negative events, failures and losses

Question 14

easier access/activation of associated sad representations in a schema

Answer 14

1. mood state dependent memory - better free recall when in same mood state and encoding and retrieval
2. thought congruity - content of thoughts/judgements are congruent with state

Question 15

antidepressant effects on memory

Answer 15

1. after 7 days of antidepressant medication, controls showed decreased recognition of negative emotional expressions
2. they also showed faster reaction times to classify positive vs negative words and greater immediate free recall of positive words
3. antidepressants increase positive bias in attention and memory in healthy controls

Question 16

cognitive bias modification

Answer 16

1. people are now using cognitive bias tasks as treatments to normalise abnormal cognitive bias
2. attentional bias modification
3. patients with anxiety and depression are trained to attend away from stimuli
4. can lead to reduction of symptoms

Question 17

cognitive bias modification in obesity

Answer 17

1. training attention and responses away from unhealthy foods and towards healthy
2. intervention vs control participants showed significantly reduced brain reward and attention region response to high calorie food images, reduced monetary valuation of high calorie food and greater body fat loss over a 4 week period

Question 18

emotion regulation

Answer 18

1. the management and control of emotional states by various processes
2. automatic/controlled, conscious/unconscious, affecting one or more points in the emotion generative process
3. behavioural control - reactive, suppressing emotional expression
4. attentional control - distraction
5. cognitive change - reappraisal, proactive

Question 19

distraction

Answer 19

may work by occupying the limited capacity of working memory with information that displaces negative emotional material

Question 20

emotion regulation

Answer 20

prefrontal cortex dampens amygdala response

Question 21

abnormal emotion regulation in depression

Answer 21

1. positive, negative or neutral word
2. followed by a numbers memory task
3. sustained amygdala response to negative emotional words in depression
4. decreased emotion regulation in depression
5. inverse relationship between DLPFC and amygdala response to negative words

Question 22

selective attention

Answer 22

1. Mitterschifthaler et al - people with depression slower to negative words
2. Elliott et al - bias towards sad targets in depression linked to increased anterior cingulate

Question 23

brain imaging treatment

Answer 23

brain stimulation decreases overactive brain region linked to sadness

Question 24

less invasive treatments

Answer 24

1. transcranial magnetic stimulation
2. brain training - strengthening the emotional regulation areas, N-back task
3. activates working memory network and deactivates emotional network
4. task performance improves with training
5. performance also improves on untrained emotion regulation tasks

Question 25

decision making - cognition and emotion collide

Answer 25

1. frontal lobe lesion - phineas gage, lesion in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, results in widespread impairment of emotional expression identification, disinhibition, impulsiveness, misinterpretation of other people's moods, impaired decision making 2. lasting effects of Gage's accident was in his personality, rude and antisocial

Question 26

somatic marker hypothesis

Answer 26

1. integrating previous feelings to make a decision 2. no conscious knowledge