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Cognition and Emotion

DD303 Challenging Issues

Topic Revision

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Components of Emotion

Behavioural laughing, crying, agitation, withdrawal, etc.

Physiological ANS activity - the ‘fight or flight response’ Brain activity – PET and MRI Scans Physiological measures – GSR, EMG

Affective (Feelings) – e.g. happiness, fear, sadness, anger, disgust – these are usually private and subjective

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The Autonomic Nervous System

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Basic Emotions

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Cross-cultural Research supportingBasic Emotions Ekman – Researched the

interpretation of facial expressions cross culturally

Peoples from different cultures consistently selected the same emotion label to describe each facial expression

Infants and Blind children display facial expressions spontaneously – innate.

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Cross Cultural Differences

The number and type of complex emotions may vary from culture to culture.

Situations that trigger emotions may vary across cultures

The socially acceptable rules for which emotions should be displayed in certain contexts may vary across cultures.

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The Dimensional Approach

Uses a small number of continuously varying dimensions to describe the range of emotional experience.

Lang et.al. devised a Affect Grid with two dimensions – Arousal and Valence Arousal – physiological responses Valence –positive/pleasant to negative/unpleasant

Different emotions can be classified along these 2 continuums – this allows for subtly mixed emotions to be classified and also we can see how different emotions relate to each other on the scales.

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Functions of Emotions

Alteration of goals – Oatley and Johnson-Laird proposed that different emotions have associated goals. We need to cognitively readjust to emotional events. e.g. anxiety – stop, attend to the environment,escape

Mobilization of physiological resources – Yerkes – Dodson Law – links the level of arousal with the complexity of the task. For an easier task higher levels of arousal are needed to attain optimal performance.

Emotional facial expressions are a means of communication.. (Fear at sight of a lion)

Emotions provide information (Damasio 1996)

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Emotions provide Information – Damasio (1996) – the Gambling Task Emotions can provide information to help with

Decision Making Participants were given a Gambling task

involving 4 decks of cards. The task was to maximize winnings.

2 bad decks (large wins and large losses) 2 good decks (modest wins and losses – over

period of time results in modest gain)

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The function of emotion, according to Damasio, is centred around decision making. Winning and losing produce physiological

changes – Somatic markers which become associated with each deck through conditioning.

After extended experience, as the player decides which deck to choose from, these somatic markers act to guide decision making… resulting in a ‘gut feeling’ for making certain choices.

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Emotion Influences Cognition

Key terms: State emotion (also called mood or affect) refers to how

you feel right now. Trait emotion refers to more stable personality

characteristics or ‘what kind of person’ you are. E.g. angry, optimistic, depressed

Manifestation of emotion refers to both the experience of emotion, the feeling state, and the expression of that experience through bodily changes and behaviours.

Processing of emotion refers to the ‘cold’ component - the processing of emotional material but without emotion being actually experienced

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Mood Congruent Memory – enhanced memory for material which matches the current mood.Research by Bower (1981) Method – P’s were hypnotised and put into either a happy or sad

mood. They were then read either a happy or sad story. They were later given a surprise recall test Findings – more was recalled from the story which matched the

mood of the participant as they were reading. Best recall occurs when mood at encoding matches mood at

retrieval = State dependent memory Implications – ‘Depressed’ individuals tend to recall more

negative memories. ‘Normal’ individuals tend to have a ‘positive bias’ in recall.

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Mood Dependent Memory - Mood dependent memory (MDM) occurs when recall is enhanced by a match between mood at the time of learning and

mood at the time of testing. Bower (1981) Method:1. Either a happy or sad mood was induced by

hypnosis2. P’s were give 2 lists of words to learn – a different

list for each mood3. P’s were asked to recall the first list – Before

testing either a happy or sad mood was induced4. Findings: List A was best recalled when mood at

recall matched mood at learning.

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Key Point

Mood Congruity means a match between mood at encoding and material being encoded;

Mood Dependency refers to a match between mood at encoding and mood at retrieval.

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Semantic Network Theory ( Bower 1981) Emotions could be represented as nodes in a

network, having numerous connections to related semantic items (words, concepts, etc.), other emotion nodes and outputs such as behaviour and autonomic responses.

Nodes become activated by external or internal stimuli and when this happens that activation selectively spreads across the network via the links to other units.

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Example of a Semantic Network

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Attention – The Emotional Stroop Similar to the original Stroop, but instead of

colour words, emotional and neutral words are used, still printed in different colours.

Participants are asked to identify the colours the words are printed in.

Anxiety related attentional bias has been found for high trait anxious individuals - interference from the anxiety relevant words is usually greater than that from the neutral words, compared with the same difference when observed in non-anxious individuals.

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The Dot Probe Task (MacCleod 1986) The task is to respond as quickly as possible

to the presentation of a dot on the screen. Before the dot a pair of word stimuli are

displayed, one threatening and one neutral. If a participant is consistently faster to find the dot whenever it appears where the threatening item was, then we can reasonably assume that they must have been attending to that item rather than to the neutral item.

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Sample of the Dot Probe Task

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Findings: There was an attentional bias for threat in Anxious patients. Control (not anxious) participants were just slightly

faster when probes appeared in the neutral rather than the threat areas of the display (another example of the normal ‘positive bias’). Anxious patients were the other way round – faster for probes appearing where threat words had been than for probes appearing where neutral words had been.

Implications – these attentional biases can also be found in Phobic individuals – eg. Fear of spiders or snakes – makes individuals have an attentional bias towards spiders or snakes.

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Semantic Interpretation

How we interpret ambiguous words – homophones or homographs can be influenced by emotion.

Eysenck et al. (1987) asked both high and low trait anxious individuals to write down the homophones as they heard them.

All the homophones had both a threatening/unpleasant and a non-threatening or neutral meaning.

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Findings: Interpretative Bias

They found that the higher the participant’s trait anxiety, the more threat spellings they produced.

Trait anxiety was linked to a tendency to assume the negative interpretation of an ambiguous stimulus.

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Research with Homographs

Richards and French (1992) presented P’s with words that were spelled the same but had dual meanings such as ‘batter’, ‘punch’ and ‘stalk’.

They used these words as primes in an experiment involving a lexical decision task - P’s had to distinguish real and non words.

If lexical decisions for trials like batter–assault were faster than for trials like batter–pancake, this would imply that the participant interpreted batter as ‘assault’ rather than ‘pancake’.

Findings - anxious participants show a negative bias in interpretation/ normal controls – a positive bias towards non-threatening meaning.

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Attribution Theory - Self-serving attribution bias.

We attribute good things internally, as something within our control, whereas bad things are attributed externally to other circumstances. – this could explain the positive bias found in normal controls.

In emotional disorders, particularly in depression or anxiety, we know that this self-serving bias can be lost or even reversed.

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Does Cognition Influence Emotion? James - Lange Theory – First we experience the

physiological changes then the emotional feeling. (we experience happiness as a result of laughing)

Cannon - Bard Theory - both the autonomic arousal and the subjective experience of a specific emotion could occur simultaneously and were instigated by the higher brain areas such as the cerebral cortex. Cannon and Bard argued that even animals with a damaged spinal cord could experience emotion.

Schachter and Singer – Cognitive Theory

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Cognitive Theory – Schachter and Singer (1960’s) Like James they held that physiological

mechanisms were crucial, but like Cannon they also believed that these responses were non-specific and could not distinguish the different emotions. Instead they thought differentiation was achieved by the individual’s particular interpretations or attributions about why those bodily responses were occurring. – Cognitive appraisals distinguish one emotion from another.

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Schachter and Singer (1962) – Classic Experiment Participants were injected with epinephrine

(adrenalin), which is a hormone that stimulates activity in the sympathetic nervous system. Some participants were told that there would be no effect of this injection while others were told that it would make their heart race.

participants were put in a room with a ‘stooge’ who was party to the experiment and who acted either in an extremely happy or very angry manner.

Findings – Those with no foreknowledge of the effects of the injection reported emotions which matched those of the stooge. Those who knew the effects of the injection did not report the emotion.

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Schachter and Singer’s Conclusions: The non-specific physiological arousal interacted

with the social and physical context that participants experienced to determine the precise emotion that was felt.

This showed that identical physiological states could be subjectively experienced as different emotions according to how the individual appraised their circumstances.

Criticisms – we now know that physiological responses for different emotions are not identical.

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Theories of Emotion

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The Cognition – Emotion Debate on the role of Cognitive Appraisal The question of whether emotion precedes

cognition, or the other way round, is known as the primacy debate.

Zajonc (like James) argues that appraisal is not necessary for emotion to be experienced. The experience of emotion comes before the cognitive processing of it.

Experiment – Items experienced subliminally through mere exposure could generate preferences with out P’s being aware.

Zajonc interpreted preference ratings as emotional experiences that were not processed cognitively.

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Support for the effect of cognitive appraisal on emotion Lazarus argued: ‘Cognitive appraisal (of meaning or

significance) underlies and is an integral feature of all emotional states’

Study – Lazarus showed participants anxiety provoking films.

One of three conditions accompanied the film – a Denial soundtrack or an Intellectualizing soundtrack or No soundtrack

GSR and heart rate measures showed that the soundtracks significantly reduced emotional response levels compared with the control group.

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A Resolution of the cognition-emotion debate Zajonc acknowledged the view that the

existence of non-conscious appraisal was a key question, and Lazarus conceded that although appraisal might influence emotion this did not mean it was an essential component.

The key question is to determine just what is the minimal information process that is required for emotion. Can untransformed pure sensory input directly generate emotional reactions?’

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LeDoux’s Two Routes

LeDoux used animals and lesioned specific neural pathways to determine the function of the damaged pathways.

Findings: Brains structures – the thalamus and the amygdala play different roles in the generation of emotion.

The lower route bypasses the higher brain structures in the cortex and provides a fast thalamo-amygdala connection involving only one synapse to produce an emotional response.

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LeDoux’s Findings The ‘higher’ route–so-called because the

evolutionarily newer areas such as the cortex are involved – relays information through a more complex route from the thalamus via the sensory cortex to the amygdala.

LeDoux has shown that learning about new fearful situations or altering existing knowledge about fear requires the higher thalamo-cortical-amygdala route to be intact and functioning. However, once fear responses are well learned, lesions to this higher route do not diminish the response, the lower thalamo-amygdala route is sufficient and can take over.

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Key point The higher route which goes via the sensory

cortex which involves higher cognitive processes may be necessary in learning new or modifying old emotional responses.

Once learned the emotional and behavioural response occurs unconsciously and automatically.

Hence when you see a lion you run – you don’t really need to think about it – the fear response occurs without the need for cognitive appraisal first.

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Sample Question 1- “To what extent and in what ways do cognitive and emotional processes influence one another?”

Guidance – Consider examples of apparent interactions between cognitive

and emotional processes You may either focus in depth on one or two types of interaction,

or consider a range of different examples. Try to make links to other chapters – e.g. memory chapters. Don’t forget to consider both directions of the interaction and To what extent = How much do cognitive and emotional

processes influence each other?

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Sample Question 2 - To what extent are cognitive processes influenced by emotion?

Examine evidence that emotion can influence cognition.

Consider the extent of this influence….how much of a type of cognitive process (e.g. memory) is influenced by emotion, and also the size of that influence – how much does emotion alter or disrupt the process?