Cognition and Emotion Course Quiz

Cognition and Emotion

• This is a course on Cognition and Emotion, taught by Dr. Itır Kaşıkçı, in the Fall 2024-25 semester at BAU Psychology.

The Birth of Psychology as a Science

• The first psychology laboratory was established in 1879.
• It was at Leipzig, Germany.
• It was established by William Wundt.
• Mind was considered too subjective to be a scientific object of study.

The Questions of Psychology

• Initial focus was on perception, which is a topic in cognitive psychology.
• Emotions were studied later due to their subjective and individual nature.
• The relationship between reason and emotion was investigated (Reason vs Emotion).

What is an Emotion?

• Emotion is a state of mind and physiological response.
• This response includes heart rate, pupillary dilation, neurotransmitter release.
• Three components of emotion, agreed upon by researchers, are:
  • Physiological reaction to a stimulus
  • Automatic bodily response to emotion
  • Behavioral response
  • Subjective feeling

What is an Emotion? (Continued)

• Emotions are evolved neurological processes that guide behavior.
• They help increase survival and reproduction.
• Psychological mechanisms are results of evolutionary processes, similar to biological mechanisms.
• Emotions serve as warning signs for survival and tell you what you should or shouldn't do.

How to Classify Emotions

• Emotional states can be classified dimensionally based on:
  • Valence (positive/negative)
  • Arousal (intensity)
  • Dominance

Categorization of Emotions

• Basic emotions have unique characteristics, are evolved, and reflected in facial expressions.
• Basic emotions are innate and expressed similarly by all humans.
• Complex emotions are combinations of basic emotions.
• Some complex emotions are socially or culturally learned, and can be identified as long-lasting, refined cognitive processes.
• Examples include love and jealousy.

Neurological Underpinnings

• Emotions have both physical and mental components.
  • Physical: heart rate, breathing speed.
  • Mental: influences brain and cognitive processes.
• Emotion-related brain areas include:
  • Amygdala: Important for survival instincts like fear (subcortical structure)
  • Prefrontal cortex (VM): Involved in identifying and interpreting emotional stimuli, integrating with context, regulating and controlling experiences.

Emotion & Perception

• Emotional arousal increases neural activity in perceptual areas (e.g., occipital and occipital-parietal cortex).
• Emotionally meaningful stimuli are processed faster than neutral stimuli.
• While processing broad characteristics of a stimulus, the ability to perceive details can decrease. Emotional arousal can alter the subjective perception, as demonstrated in the case of estimating the height of a balcony.

Emotion & Attention

• Emotionally significant or unexpected stimuli elicit more attention.
• Emotionally arousing stimuli attract attention, as in the case of seeing a snake.
• Attention can affect emotional responses, like developing negative emotional responses towards ignored stimuli.
• Negative emotions, like fear, influence visual search by directing attention to emotionally pertinent objects (spiders).
• The amygdala plays a stronger role in shifting attention than the frontal lobe during visual search tasks.
• Attentional blink might be reduced when stimuli are emotionally salient.

Emotion & Attention (Emotional Stroop)

• Emotional Stroop task demonstrates that emotionally salient stimuli (spider) reduce cognitive processing speed (color-naming) relative to neutral words.
• Suppressing emotions can lead to attenuation in control resources, affecting performance in cognitive tasks.

Emotion & Memory

• Emotional experiences are often the most memorable.
• Intensity of emotions, rather than positivity or negativity, is more closely linked to memorability.
• Emotional content impacts memory consolidation, even after initial learning.
• Emotions can help to enhance memory through a variety of pathways, like increasing activity in the amygdala.

Emotion & Memory (Emotional Context)

• Mood-congruent memories: Emotions activate memories relevant to the current emotional state.
• Mood-dependent memories: Recall improves when the retrieval mood matches the encoding mood.
• Flashbulb memories: Vivid memories of highly emotional events, often showing increased amygdala activity during retrieval (Personal involvement also strengthens details).

Emotion & Memory (Yerkes-Dodson law, Easterbrook hypothesis)

• Yerkes-Dodson law: Optimal performance occurs at moderate levels of emotional arousal.
• Easterbrook hypothesis: High emotional arousal narrows attention, enabling better memory for central details, but worse memory for peripheral details.

Emotion & Language

• Emotion words are present in all languages.
• Prosody (the rising and falling pitch of speech) communicates emotions in language; same sentence, different prosody, different emotions.
• People can determine emotional genuineness through prosody.
• External manifestations (actions, mimics, physiological signs) contribute to emotion comprehension.

Emotion & Decision Making

• Stress can impair performance by crowding working memories with irrelevant thoughts, leading to reduced resources.
• Choking under pressure refers to a decline in performance due to external anxieties.
• Outcome-based pressure: Focusing on task outcomes distracts from task execution.
• Monitoring pressure: Excessive focus on task performance can diminish overall performance.
• Stereotype threat can lead to underperformance when negative stereotypes are activated.
• Stress can sometimes improve performance when viewed as a challenge rather than a threat.

Test your understanding of key concepts in the Cognition and Emotion course taught by Dr. Itır Kaşıkçı. Explore the birth of psychology as a science, the study of emotions, and the intricate relationship between reason and emotion. This quiz highlights significant definitions and components of emotions.