Week 3: Emotion Processing: Bottom-Up Effects of Emotions on Cognitive Processes Flashcards
Attention
Is a set of cognitive functions that select and prioritise some information for further
processing.
Emotional Stimuli
Objects, events, or situations that signal potential danger or reward, can grab attention.
‘Pop-out’ Effects of Emotional Stimuli
- Things that signal danger or reward (scary animal or delicious food) quickly grab our attention.
- We quickly focus on important things helped us survive.
- Our brains process emotional things faster and remember them better.
Discrepant Stimulus
A stimulus or something that stands out or is different from the other things around it.
Autonomic Arousal
This refers to the body’s automatic responses to a stimulus, like increased heart rate or sweating.
Pop-Out Effect
This is when a stimulus is so different from others that it immediately grabs your attention, like a red dot on a white page.
Attentional Bias
The tendency to pay attention to some things while simultaneously ignoring others.
Negative Attentional Bias
Is a specific type of attentional bias that refers to a tendency to focus on negative information, particularly threats.
Attentional Orienting
Automatically directing attention towards a specific stimulus.
A hypervigilance towards the emotional stimulus
Attentional Avoidance
Deliberately shifting attention away from a specific stimulus.
Eye Tracking Methods
Are methods that enable a more continuous measure of attention because they can measure initial fixations to particular stimuli as they appear on a screen. As well as the length of time spent gazing at a particular stimulus before a fixation away from the stimulus occurs.
Hypervigilance
Excessive attention to potential threats.
Disengagement Difficulty
Trouble shifting attention away from a stimulus.
Emotional Stroop Task
Measures the impact of emotional words on task performance.
Social Threat Cues
These are words or phrases related to social situations that might cause anxiety, such as “rejected,” “embarrassed,” or “alone.”
Physical Worriers
Individuals who are primarily concerned with physical symptoms of anxiety, like heart palpitations or shortness of breath.
Positive Attentional Bias
Is an attentional bias that is associated with optimism and resilience.
It’s less common in depression.
Maladaptive
Behavior or thoughts that are harmful or dysfunctional.
They interfere with a person’s ability to adjust to their environment and achieve their goals.
Example: In anxiety - excessive worry and avoidance behaviors
Psychopathology
The scientific study of mental disorders.
It also refers to the manifestations of mental illness.
Self Associations (self-reference effect)
Information related to oneself is learned and remembered better than information about others.
Fear Conditioning
The occurrence of an aversive or unpleasant stimulus can transfer some of the fear-provoking effects to other neutral stimuli that are in the environment through association.
Fear Extinction
To reduce the fear, the individual has to experience
the conditioned threat stimulus without the aversive unconditioned stimulus across many trials.
Phobia
An excessive and irrational fear of a specific object or situation.
Unlike fear, they are often persistent and uncontrollable.
Vicarious Learning
Sometimes also referred to as observational learning or social referencing.
It is when people acquire fears by observing fearful responses to what was previously a neutral stimulus or situation in other people.
