Cognition and emotion - summary of chapter 14 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, M

Cognitive Psychology
Chapter 14
Cognition and emotion

Skin conductance response: (or galvanic skin response GSR) reflects changes in the skin’s ability to conduct electricity in the presence of an emotion-eliciting stimulus.

What is an emotion?

Emotion: a number of mental states including anger, joy and disgust.
Relatively short-lived and associated with an eliciting event, be it an environmental trigger or a thought.

Four key features that distinguish the emotions form other affective states:

• Emotions are bounded episodes elicited when an event occurs that is of relevance to an organism’s need, goals or well-being. Relevance is determined by an appraisal of the event on a number of criteria, including novelty, pleasantness and its motivational value.
• Emotions prepare the organism to act so as to deal with an event.
• Emotions affect most or all bodily systems such that their functioning can be synchronizes for an effective purpose.
• Emotions establish control precedence over behavior, so that actions can be prioritized.

Emotions provide us with essential feedback on the execution of our plans relative to our goals, and allow us to detect, and work to reduce, discrepancies between actual and expected value.

An emotion has a clear onset and a somewhat fuzzy offset.
Emotions tend to be intense, and short-lived, preparing us to act.

Moods can be caused by emotions and can be the after-effects of an emotional reaction.

Particular regions of the brain might be linked with particular emotions.
Amygdala: an almond shaped set of structures located in the medial temporal lobe. Linked to fear.
Limbic system: consist of the thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus and amygdala, and other structures.
Insula: an area hidden within the folds of the cortex, with connections to the cingulate, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, implicated in aspects of emotion, cognition and action. Linked to disgust.
The anterior cingulated cortex is linked to sadness.
Orbitofrontal cortex is linked with anger.

Default network: a network of brain regions that is active when a person is not focused on the external environment.
Salience network: involved in monitoring the external and internal environments to allow detection of salient stimuli.

The cognitive view of emotions is that they have important immediate and long-term functions that allow us to adapt to a changing environment.

Core emotions

Emotions are associated with distinctive facial expressions and gestures.
Display rules: social conventions governing how, when and with whom emotions may be expressed.

There is evidence for a basic set of emotional expressions that is largely consistent across cultures.
These arguably correspond to a set of basic or core emotions.

A core set of emotions liked to facial expressions.
Blind adults show the same facial expressions as seeing adults.
Even newborn babies have the same facial expressions.
But, learning also plays a role.

Ekman listed six basic emotions:

• Anger
• Disgust
• Fear
• Happiness
• Sadness
• Surprise

The characteristics of the basic emotions:

• Distinctive universal signals
• Distinctive physiology
• Automatic appraisal, tuned to:
  Distinctive universals in antecedent events
  Distinctive appearance developmentally
• Presence in other primates
• Quick onset
• Brief duration
• Unbidden occurrence
• Distinctive thoughts, memories images
• Distinctive subjective experience

There is considerable cross-cultural variation in language related to emotion.

The ‘core’ of emotion

There is more to emotion than a particular facial configuration.
Emotions are characterized by certain physiological disturbances: changes in facial expression, particular gestures, behaviors, thoughts, beliefs and desires.

Human emotions are characterized by four components:

•  Cognitive
  Allows us to mentally register the significance of the emotion. This can be conscious or unconscious.
  Appraisal: the ways in which people interpret or explain to themselves the meaning of events. Propose that we monitor our environments for information that is of relevance to us.
  Emotion depends on appraisal of the situation.
• Motivational-behavioral
  Involves our actions in response to the emotion.
• Somatic
  The activation of:
  • Automatic nervous system (ANS); part of the peripheral nervous system and regulates internal organs.
  • Central nervous system (CNS): consist of the brain and spinal cord.
• Subjective-experimental
  Involves the actual experience of the emotion for the individual.

The bodily changes that occur with an emotional state are the most apparent component.
Emotions are associated with certain changes in the autonomic nervous system.
These physiological changes prepare the animal for action.

There is evidence for distinct patterns of cardiorespiratory activity associated with the basic emotions.
We cannot detect an emotion precisely form somatic changes in the body. So there must be cognition that procedures the emotion.

Theories of emotion and cognition

Early theories and their influence

James-Lange theory

Experience of an emotion follows the physiological changes associated with that state.
An emotion arises from bodily feedback.
Emotion is the perception of bodily changes.

Facial feedback hypothesis: proposes that feedback from the facial muscles can influence emotional state.
Feedback from muscle activity can influence emotional experience.

Evaluation:
While bodily changes would seem to play an important role in emotional experience, it does not follow that muscle movement causes emotional experience.

Cannon-Bard theory

The same psychological state can be associated with different emotions.
Physiological changes that accompany an emotion can occur without an emotional experience.
The same bodily changes as occur during emotion occur in different non-emotional states, such as fever, but it does not give rise to an emotion.
The conscious experience of emotion occurs quickly, while visceral changes occurred slowly, too slowly to be the cause of emotion.
Physiological changes are characteristic of emotion ca be elicited artificially using adrenalin, but this does not give rise to emotion.

A key role to the thalamus.
The emotional experience and the physiological changes arise concurrently from the stimulus event.
The experience of emotion and the bodily changes are independent.
An emotion provoking event leads to signals being sent simultaneously to the cortex (producing the conscious experience of an emotion) and to the autonomic nervous system (producing the physiological changes).

Two factor theory

Two factors create emotions:

• Physiological arousal
• Our interpretation of physiological arousal
  When we experience arousal, we try to work out the basis for the physiological change.
  It is our cognitive interpretation of the initially undifferentiated physiological arousal that produces the emotion.

Affective-primacy: Zajonc’s theory

Cognition is not necessary for emotion. The two systems can function independently, although they rarely do in everyday life.
While cognition can influence emotion at a later stage of processing, the initial emotional response can be unaffected by cognition.
Automatic affective judgment could be made without cognition.

Mere exposure effect: the tendency for people to develop a preference for a stimulus with repeated exposure to it.

There is a fundamental qualitative difference between conscious and unconscious perception, our emotions can be affected by unconsciously perceived stimuli.

Cognitive primacy: Lazarus’s theory

Appraisal theories: have in common the assertion that emotions result form our interpretations of , or reactions to, events.
Whether emotion is generated in response to perceived, remembered, or imagined events, and by automatic or controlled processing, appraisal theories claim that appraisals start the emotion process, initiating the physiological, expressive, behavioral and other changes that comprise the resultant emotional state.
Cognitive appraisal is fundamental to emotional experience and you cannot separate out the cognitive aspect of emotion.
Three types of cognitive appraisal:

• The primary appraisal is an initial assessment of a situation as being positive, negative or threatening, or irrelevant
• The secondary appraisal involves an assessment of the resources we have available to us in dealing with the particular situation.
• Reappraisal involves continual monitoring of the situation until it is resolved.

Lazarus sees cognition and appraisal as involving both conscious and non-conscious processes.

Multi-level theories of emotion: propose that both preattentive and conscious cognitive processes are involved in emotion.

LeDoux
There are two ways in which an emotion is registered.

• A direct, ‘low’ route. From the thalamus to amydala. This allows very fast responses
• A slower route, from thalamus via cerebral cortex to amygdala. This allows us to appraise the situation when acting on the emotion.

Subsequent appraisal theories
Low-level bodily hormonal, and affective reaction often get the emotional process started, and cognitive appraisal processes act like a sculptor, shaping general affective reactions into specific emotions’.

Effects of emotion on cognition

Emotion affects cognition in many ways, and processing of emotional information differs from processing of neutral information.

Emotion and attention

Attentional bias: the tendency for emotional stimuli to capture or draw attention.

Emotional content of words will take attention form the primary task, disrupting performance (emotional stroop task).

Stimuli such as pictures of fear-relevant animals attract attention. This is important for us to be able to act quickly in the presence of a threat.

Visual search task: require an active search for a visual array, usually for a particular object or stimulus feature.
Pre-attentive visual search is faster for emotional information compared to neutral information.

Emotion and perception

Perception and emotion are closely related.

Presence of an emotional stimulus heightened contrast sensitivity.
Emotion increases participants’ field of view.

The top-down influence of emotion is also evident for other sensory modalities.

• Loudness in perception is influenced by emotion. Negative mood rates the tones louder.

Similar for speech perception.

Emotion and memory

Memory for emotional events is generally better than for events that do not arouse emotions. With both quantitative and qualitative effects.
Extreme emotion can have a negative effect on cognition.

Flashbulb memories: effects of emotion

While people may report vivid memories for emotional material, such memory is not error-free.
Also false memory can be reported for an emotionally charged event.

Self-monitoring: the extent to which a person is concerned with self-presentation and how others perceive them.
Higher self-monitoring scale are associated with an increased likelihood of making false (suggested) memories.

Emotion affects our memory for events.
The timing and nature of the retrieval task is crucial. As the delay between the target event and the memory test increases, people become more likely to error. Error is reduced when participants have a good memory for the original event.

There is increased activation of amygdala bilaterally for pictures that were relate as more emotionally intense. Memory of this pictures were also better.
In particular activation of the left amygdala predicted recognition, suggesting an emotional-specific mechanism.
Memory for negative stimuli is generally better than for neutral or (on some occasions) positive stimuli.

Tunnel memory: the enhancement of memory of central details with reduced memory for peripheral details.
This is mostly by negative emotions.

Under many conditions, emotion enhances memory.

Mood congruent memory

Mood congruency: the tendency to recall events consistent with current mood state.
Network models or memory: treat memories as items related in a network which affect each other though activation.
Mood dependent memory: memory for emotionally neutral materials is facilitated when the mood state at encoding matches that at retrieval.
State-dependent-memory: the facilitation of memory when the mental or physiological state at encoding and retrieval matches.

Mood congruence has a stronger effect when participants generate their own material.
Mood dependent effects are stronger for internal than for external events.

When someone is in a negative mood state, they are motivated to reduce that state and create a more positive mood. This leads to the retrieval of more positive memories and evoke a positive mood in the person. Or at least reduces the negative mood.

Affect infusion model (AIM)
Distinction:

• Motivated processing
  Highly predetermined and directed information search patterns and require little generative, constructive processing.
  Might be used by someone to regulate their moods and because it accesses previously established goal stats and is less susceptible to the effects of current mood.
• Constructive processing.
  A generative processing strategy. Using a heuristic of substantive, elaborate, type of processing. This type of processing underlies mood congruency effects.

Thought congruity: the tendency for thoughts and judgments to be consistent with mood state.