Emotion, Motivation, and Cognition Lecture Notes PDF

How emotion and motivation affect attention, decision-making, learning, memory, risk analysis, vision - People tend to pay more attention to emotional over neutral information Emotion and attention - Emotional stimuli and elements of complex stimuli grab attention, slowing task perfo...

How emotion and motivation affect attention, decision-making, learning, memory, risk analysis, vision - People tend to pay more attention to emotional over neutral information Emotion and attention - Emotional stimuli and elements of complex stimuli grab attention, slowing task performance requiring attention to neutral stimuli - Anxiety-prone people tend to look quickly toward disturbing images, but then look away a half-second later Dot-probe task - In this task, researchers examine individual differences in the extent to which emotion-eliciting images distract participants from finding a dot on the screen, as compared to the effect of neutral images - it takes longer to find dot when there is emotion eliciting stimuli vs neutral - Some studies suggest that anxiety-prone individuals show more intense attentional bias on this task, but the research is inconsistent broaden- and -build hypothesis of positive emotions - Early work by barbara fredrickson and others indicated that while negative emotions may focus attention (in order to solve problems), positive emotions may broaden attention (in order to identify new opportunities and build resources) - Some trials ask you to identify the larger (global) letter, some the little (local) letter - The response times to each are compared to get a global and local score - Results show that positive emotions lead to more global attention, while negative emotions lead to more local attention A critical modification to broaden-and-build - Others (including Harmon-Jones) argued that not all positive emotions may have the same effect on attention, that we need to consider the emotion’s motivational intensity - Jones demonstrated that the broadening effect of positive emotions on attention might be limited to low intensity positive stimuli - Pre-goal emotions are high in motivational intensity, involve solving of problems (likelier to withdraw from threat or approaching reward) - Post-goal emotions are low in motivational intensity, involve reactions to events that have already happened (likelier to be sadness or commitment, for example) - Approach-motivated positive affect reduces breadth of attention (gable and jones) - Other studies show that dessert images (high motivational intensity led to more global vs. local attention; you’re trying to figure out how to get the dessert - When you tell participants they’ll get to eat the dessert (making it post-goal), this effect reduces - Variance of emotion may not be the best predictor of attentional scope - Whereas the pleasant image on the left tends to elicit global attention, the one on the right tends to elicit more focused attention to detail The upward spiral theory of lifestyle change (from fredrickson and joiner, 2018)  - This is good for you (refer to table below) Emotion and memory: encoding - Memory encoding= the initial formation of a new memory - Bradley, greenwald, petry, and lang (1992) - question= are emotionally arousing images better remembered? - Procedure = view 60 photos of objects and events, ranging from neutral to emotionally intense - measures rate pleasantness and arousal of each photo; memory test immediately and one year later - Results (percent recalled, by rating)= memory is predicted best by ratings of (higher) arousal, even up to a year later Arousal and memory - Yerkes-dodson law= the proposal that attention, learning, and other aspects of cognition are at their best when arousal is at an intermediate level - Pictures that elicit a stronger electrodermal response are more likely to be remembered after a delay (greenwald) - Emotionally arousing pictures are better remembered even when presented briefly (harris and pashler) - Cahill, prins, weber, mcgaugh (1994) - question= does emotional memory facilitation depend on physiological arousal? - Procedure= view slides while hearing emotional or nonemotional accompanying - Participants injected with either a beta-blocker, which interferes with peripheral effects of sympathetic nervous system activation (e.g. heart rate), or a placebo - measures= memory for story details  - Results- participants told the story with the emotionally intense middle remembered details better, unless they had been given beta-blockers - Implication = physiological arousal is necessary for emotional facilitation of memory Flashbulb memories - Vivid, detailed memories of unusually intense emotional experiences; research shows they are far more accurate than more ordinary memories - Weaver (1991) - question= are memories of emotionally intense experiences more accurate than neutral memories? - participants= undergraduate psychology students - procedure= on jan 16, 1991, students wrote a description of an ordinary event and completed questionnaire about details - 1st iraq war started later that day; detailed descriptions (from participants) of hearing this news were collected on jan 18 - measures= recall for details of both events assessed 3 months later - results= 3 months later, participants were more confident in their memories of the war beginning than the ordinary event, but the memories were no more accurate - The “water cooler” phenomenon may account for the discrepancy; when memories are retrieved and discussed, they may be stored in an altered form (inda, muravieva) Emotion and memory consolidation - consolidation= strengthening of a memory during the period after its formation - Activation of the amygdala facilitates memory consolidation - Synaptic tag-and-capture hypothesis= proposal that the brain tags new memories for enhanced consolidation later, if subsequent events indicate that memory is especially important (presumably because we feel more emotional about events related to our goals and relationships) - Sleep not only feels great, good sleep might also be critical for developing long-term memories Emotional and memory retrieval - State-dependent retrieval= general principle that were or are more likely to recall a memory in a state similar to the one we were in when the memory was formed - People are more likely to activate memories of times when their emotions matches the current mood Emotions and information processing - Keltner, ellsworth, and edwards (1993) - question= do appraisals associated with preceding emotion “carry over” to an unrelated situation? - participants= undergraduate students - procedure= emotion task eliciting anger or sadness - They would hear story about an embarrassing situation, in which a crush you invited to a party arrives with a date, housemates begin teasing you  - results= angry people are more likely to blame the housemates, sad people are likelier to blame bad luck Systematic vs heuristic processing - Systematic cognition= logical reasoning, careful and effortful evaluation of available information (in order to make a decision) - Heuristic cognition= making decisions based on shortcuts, superficial, and irrelevant factors; relies on surface-level details to make a quick decision Mood and cognitive processing - Bless, bohner, schwarz, and strack (1990) - question= does mood alter cognitive processing? - participants = undergraduate students - procedure= describe and relive a personal pleasant or unpleasant experience - Listen to a series of strong vs weak arguments for raising student fees at the students’ university - measures= agreement with proposed change, indicating persuasion - results= participants in a sad mood were persuaded by the strong arguments, but not the weak ones, suggesting more systematic cognition - Participants in a happy mood were persuaded equally by the strong and weak arguments, suggesting more heuristic cognition Effects of valence, or certainty? - Tiedens and linton (2001) - question= is processing style altered by mood valence, or by certainty appraisal? - procedure= participants randomly assigned to emotion condition - Read and evaluate the essay supposedly written by student or professor - results= participants’ ratings were influenced by writer status in high-certainty, but not low-certainty moods Mood and creativity - Isen, daubman, and nowicki (1987) - question= does positive affect increase creativity? - procedure= watch funny or neutral film; then solve candle-matchbox test (they had to affix a candle to the wall without it dripping) - Results= after the funny film, participants were more likely to solve the problem and solved it faster The affect infusion model (forgas, 1995) - Theory that people’s mood influences their evaluation of other events, including those unrelated to the reason for the current mood - People report higher life satisfaction on sunny vs cloudy days (cunningham) - Participants with a cold report worse symptoms after sadness induction than happy, neutral induction (salovey and birnbaum) - Happy people assign lower, sad people higher value to objects (lerner, small) The somatic marker hypothesis - Theory that we make decisions by imagining the emotional consequences of various possible options, and select the choice that “feels” best - Individuals with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex do not show normal electrodermal responses when contemplating risky action; fail to learn from mistakes Emotions and moral reasoning - Trolley dilemma= you must decide whether to flip a switch, turning a trolley away from killing 5 people, but toward one who will die - Footbridge dilemma= you must decide whether to push a big wrestler off a footbridge, killing him but stopping a trolley that will otherwise kill 5 people - People are more likely to take action in the trolley dilemma than in the footbridge dilemma, though logically they pose the same problem - People tend to experience more guilt for committed vs omitted acts - In general, people tend to make moral decisions based upon emotional “gut reactions” then seek out logical arguments and facts to support that conclusion When emotions impair decisions - About 50% of US college students say they would bet $10 on a one in a million chance of winning 1 million dollars; statistically, that’s a terrible bet - Decision about risk are highly responsive to magnitude of possible reward, less so to probability of receiving the reward Emotional intelligence - Perceiving emotional signals - Understanding emotions - Managing emotions, such as calming oneself down or relieving someone else’s anxiety - Ability to communicate emotions effectively - Definitions vary, but emotional intelligence involves skill at tasks involving emotion The evidence for emotional intelligence and its training - Weaknesses and inconsistency in measurement - Poorly designed control groups - Small sample sizes - Lack of randomization - Nonetheless, both a systematic review of the literature (koutsou 2019) and a meta-analysis (mattingly and kraiger 2019) revealed that later research on emotional intelligence training produced more promising results, indicating training effects above and beyond that of control groups - Growth mindset= belief that intelligence, abilities, and skills grow in response to practice and experience  - Fixed mindset= belief that intelligence, abilities, and skills are innate, fixed, and immutable to change - Research has indicated that growth mindsets are associated with numerous positive personal and academic outcomes compared to fixed mindsets- both in correlational studies and those with growth mindset interventions - Subsequent research has indicated these effects might be quite small and sensitive to specific contexts Achievement motivation - Motivation stemming from competition with an external or internal standard, for reasons of either performance of mastery - Locke and schattke (2019) made a proposal for how the intrinsic/extrinisic motivation dichotomy could be reconceptualized as a “trichotomy” Achievement goal theory: two achievement goal types - Mastery= individual development of competence and satisfaction - performance= motivated by social comparison and competition