Cognition And Emotion - BAU Psychology Fall 2024-2025 PDF

Cognition and Emotion Dr. Itır Kaşıkçı 2024-25 Fall / BAU Psychology The Birth of Psychology as a Science  Establishment of the first psychology laboratory:  Late 19th century: 1879.  At Leipzig, Germany.  By William Wundt. Why too late? Becau...

Cognition and Emotion Dr. Itır Kaşıkçı 2024-25 Fall / BAU Psychology The Birth of Psychology as a Science  Establishment of the first psychology laboratory:  Late 19th century: 1879.  At Leipzig, Germany.  By William Wundt. Why too late? Because mind was seen as too subjective to be the object of science. The Questions of Psychology The first questions of Psychology as a science:  They were mainly focusing on perception.  Perception is a topic of Cognitive Psychology. Emotions were studied even later  Because emotions were seen as too subjective and too individual to be studied.  Reason vs Emotion (!) What is an emotion?  Cog Psy metaphor: Human vs computers  Hot vs Cold cognition  Studying human cognition without emotions?  Emotion: The state of mind a person is in at a particular moment, as well as the physiological response a person is experiencing at that time (in terms of heart rate, pupillary dilation, neurotransmitter release, and so on). Three Components of Emotions (That most researchers agree on) 1. A physiological reaction to a stimulus  Automatic bodily reactions to an emotion triggering stimulus. 2. A behavioral response (Action!)  Mostly towards or away from the stimulus 3. A subjective experience (Feeling)  More complex What Is an Emotion?  Emotions are neurological processes that have evolved, which guide behavior in such a manner as to increase survival and reproduction.  As the definition suggests: Emotions are evolved capacities.  Psychological mechanisms are results of evolutionary processes like biological mechanisms.  What is the function of emotions?  Warning signs for survival.  Inner alarms that tells you what you should or shouldn’t do. How to classify emotions?  Dimensional approach  Valence, arousal or intensity (+dominance)  Valence and intensity approach  Valence: Whether an emotion is positive, like happiness, or negative, such as sadness, anger, or disgust.  Intensity: How strongly an emotion is experienced.  Dominance: Whether an emotion makes someone feel dominant or submissive Categorization of Emotions Basic emotions:  A closed set of emotions with unique characteristics.  Evolved and reflected through facial expressions.  Every humen being have basic emotions from birth (innate) and express them in the same way.  Facial expressions, body postures Complex emotions:  Combinations of basic emotions  Some of which may be socially or culturally learned  Can be identified as refined, long-lasting cognitive versions of basic emotions.  Example: Love, jealousy. Neurological Underpinnings  Emotion has both physical and mental components.  Physical: hearts rate, breathing speed etc.  Mental: Influences brain and cognition.  Emotion related brain areas:  Amygdala: Subcortical structure. Involved in instinctual emotions that are important for survival, such as fear.  (VM) Prefrontal cortex: Front part of the frontal cx. Identification and interpretation of emotional stimuli and responses, integration emotional interpretation with the context, regulation and control of experiences.  Phineas Gage Emotion & Perception  Emotion increases the neural activity in perceptual brain areas, such as the occipital and occipital-parietal cortex.  Emotions make some things easier to perceive than others.  Recognize things faster if they are emotionally meaningful than if they are not such as identifying briefly flashed words like “death” and “love”.  The ability to process broad, global, or general characteristics of the threating item inclines BUT the ability to perceive details declines.  Emotion can alter the subjective perception.  emotional arousal experienced was interpreted cognitively as being part of the experience of looking down from balcony. Emotion & Attention  If there is something that elicits our emotions, we are more likely to pay attention to it.  Orienting reflex: Emotionally significant or sudden / unexpected stimulus.  Emotion can affect the direction of attention  People are more likely to direct their attention to emotionally arousing stimuli, such as a seeing a snake in the grass.  Attention can also influence how you feel about things.  People can develop a negative emotional response toward things that they try to ignore. Emotion & Attention Visual search: Trying to find an object in a display of irrelevant distractors.  Negative emotions such as fear, can influence the visual search processes.  The inclusion of emotion-eliciting stimuli in a display, such as spiders or fearful faces, facilitates the direction of attention to such objects during visual search.  This shifting is directed more by the amygdala than by emotional control processes in the frontal lobe  Negative emotions increase the use of attentional resources  Even the processing of non-emotional targets in a visual search task is facilitated Attentional blink: If two stimuli are presented very rapidly in sequence, we sometimes miss the second one.  Reduced or absent attentional blink for emotionally loaded stimulus. Emotion & Attention Emotional Stroop task : Words that elicit an emotional response (spider) vs neutral words (spade) are presented in different colors.  People name the color of the word slower if the word is emotional.  Reading the word and accessing its meaning happens automatically. Emotional words takes away resources from the other cognitive processes necessary for focusing. Thus color naming is slowed down. Emotional Self-Control :Which is better for cognition? Expressing or suppressing emotions?  Suppression of your emotions can lead to attentional control problems.  Emotions take resources for attentional control.  There were fewer resources available for doing other tasks Emotion & Memory  Amygdala: Implicit aspects of memory  Lesion: No fear conditioning.  Prefrontal cx : Explicit memory processes  Hippocampus lesion: No conscious memory of conditioning.  In a list of emotionally loaded and neutral words, loaded will be remembered better.  ERP study shows occipito-temporal activity around 250 ms for emotionally loaded words compared to neutrals.  Emotion & Memory - Making Memory Better  Emotional experiences are often the most memorable.  Not the valence but the intensity of emotion crucial.  Shown both in naturalistic and laboratory conditions.  Autobiographical memories, word lists, images etc.  Emotion is important not only at learning but also at reconsolidation.  Experiment: People learn a set of English–Swahili vocabulary pairs  After learning, they were asked to recall the word pairs while they were shown either a blank screen, or a neutral or an emotional picture.  Later they were asked to recall the word pairs again.  memory was better for words that had been followed by the emotional pictures. Emotion & Memory – Emotional Context  Mood-congruent memories, emotions activate or prime in LTMs that fit your emotional state.  In a happy mood people think about things that make them happy  Works below consciousness, a kind of priming.  Mood-dependent memories, people find it easier to remember things when they are in the same mood at retrieval as they were during encoding. *state dependent encoding / learning.  Flashbulb memories  People remembering a flashbulb memory event show increased amygdala activity during retrieval.  Personal involvement – more details remembered Emotion & Memory - Yerkes-Dodson law  Performance is poor at low levels of emotional intensity,  I don’t care about this course.  It increases as intensity goes up.  I’m interested in the course and want to get good grades.  Then decreases for high levels of intensity.  I must get the highest grade otherwise it will be my end. Emotion & Memory - Easterbrook hypothesis  At higher levels of arousal, memory does not decline for everything  there are some things for which memory continues to improve.  Easterbrook hypothesis: At higher levels of emotional arousal there is a narrowing of attention onto whatever is eliciting the emotions.  Memory for the central details continues to get better, but memory for peripheral details declines.  Thus overall memory is getting worse at high levels of emotional arousal, but things that are most important might be remembered really well.  Tunnel Memories, Weapon Focus Effect Emotion & Language  The emotion words: Present in all languages.  Prosody: The moving up and down in pitch of speech, somewhat like a melody that is involved in language.  Same sentence, different prosody, different emotions.  Right lateralized.  People are able to determine the genuineness of the emotion by prosody.  External manifestations of emotion  Actions, mimics, physiological signs. Emotion & Decision Making Stress Impairs Performance  When people experience anxiety, they tend to crowd their working memory with task irrelevant thoughts.  Less resources available for the task itself. Choking under pressure  When people become anxious because of external pressures, their performance can decline.  Let the procedural memory save you.  Emotion & Decision Making  Outcome-based pressure: A person is distracted from focusing on what s/he supposed to be doing, but instead focuses on the outcome of the task.  Results in a decline in attentional control  Talking aloud to focus on the task  Monitoring pressure: The person focuses too much attention on the task and how they are doing it.  Conscious vs automatic  Stereotype threat: When the unconscious activation of negative stereotypes leads a person to perform worse on a task than they would otherwise. Emotion & Decision Making Stress Improves Performance  Bad stress vs good stress.  Performance can improve when the stress being experienced is viewed as challenging rather than threatening Resources: Ashcraft, M., & Radvansky, G. (2014). Cognition (Pearson new international edition). Harlow, Essex: Pearson. Schultz D.P. & Schultz S.E. A History of Modern Psychology. 10th ed. Next week: Repetitipns & Midterm II THANK YOU. THANK YOU