L&M Emotion PDF

Emotion in L&M ​ Emotion ○​ Emotion: a cluster of three distinct but interrelated sets of phenomena- physiological responses, overt behaviors, and conscious feelings- produced in response to an affecting situation ○​ Different emotions can be organized according to tw...

Emotion in L&M ​ Emotion ○​ Emotion: a cluster of three distinct but interrelated sets of phenomena- physiological responses, overt behaviors, and conscious feelings- produced in response to an affecting situation ○​ Different emotions can be organized according to two dimensions: affective valence (positive vs negative) and degree of arousal ​ High arousal, positive valence: excited ​ High arousal, negative valence: angry ​ Low arousal, negative valence: depressed ​ Low arousal, positive valence: relaxed ○​ Neutral, low arousal: boot ○​ Negative, high arousal: snake ​ More biologically meaningful, threat to safety ○​ Physiological responses prepare organism to respond to threat ​ Fight or flight response: a collection of bodily responses that prepare the body to face a threat ​ Increased blood flow ​ Increased rate of respiration ​ Release of stress hormones (adrenaline) ​ Reflexive and conditioned emotional responses ○​ Fear responses to aversive events can be reflexive ​ Ex: fearful reaction to lightning strike ○​ But can also be learned through conditioning, as with conditioned fear responses to stimuli which predict arrival of aversive events ​ Ex: avoidant behavior in Little Albert ​ The importance of appraisal ○​ Our emotional experience is not solely based on physiological arousal, but also depends on how we interpret that arousal in a given context ​ Cognitive appraisal: the subjective interpretation of a stimulus or situation in relation to one’s well being or goals ○​ Similar physiological responses can be associated with very different emotional states depending on appraisal of the context ​ Fear vs excitement ○​ Cognitive reappraisal: changing ones interpretation of a situation or arousing event ​ Example of emotion regulation strategy ○​ Requires effortful cognitive control to inhibit automatic responses to stress or fear inducing situations ​ The function of emotion ○​ Why do we have physiological responses to affective situations?  ​ Physiological responses prepare organisms to act adaptively (avoid threats or obtain rewards) ○​ Why should we consciously experience emotion? ​ Allows us to reason about causes for emotional response and, if necessary, self regulate ​ Emotional states help us to perceive and remember biologically and/or personally relevant information ○​ Why should we communicate our emotional state? ​ Help us to share information about meaningful events and understand others behavior (when we recognize their emotional state) ​ Emotion and memory ○​ How does emotion affect our memory of experienced events? ​ Emotion enhances episodic memory relative to neutral events ​ Emotional states serve as context for events ​ Emotion changes how we attend to details of an event ​ Emotion enhances episodic memory ○​ Emotional memories often recalled in vivid detail, as though reliving the experience (episodic recollection) ○​ In lab studies, emotionally arousing stimuli are typically associated with improved memory compared to neutral information ​ Cahill and McGaugh compared memory for details of a slideshow accompanied by narration that was either neutral or arousing ​ Larger numbers of details recalled from the emotional portion of the slideshow ○​ Similar enhancements seen for positively valenced events, although to a lesser extent than negatively valenced events ​ Emotion as a contextual cue ○​ Affective responses to emotional events are part of our memory for those events (interoceptive context) ​ Newly experienced emotions can serve as retrieval cues for memories associated with similar emotional responses ○​ Mood congruent memory: current mood acts as a retrieval cue, facilitating the retrieval of memories for events experienced in the same mood ​ Leads to self reinforcing behavior in clinical conditions associated with negative mood: negative feelings prompt retrieval ​ Emotion focuses attention ○​ Emotional arousal leads to better memory for central details relevant to emotional content, but poorer memory for peripheral details  ○​ A study compared memory for neutral vs emotional stimuli and the contexts in which they appeared ○​ Weapons focus: tendency of an eyewitness to concentrate attention on the weapon used to commit a crime, at the expense of other details about the perpetrator or the scene ​ Summary ○​ Emotion involved complex interactions between physiological responses, cognitive appraisals, and overt behaviors ○​ Emotion is important to interpret and respond adaptively to biologically or personally meaningful situations ○​ Emotion has widespread effects on episodic memory, changing how we encode and retrieve details of our experience ​ Emotion and episodic memory ○​ Emotionally arousing events tend to be remembered better than neutral, non-arousing events ○​ People can often say they can retrieve specific details of highly emotional life events (episodic recollection) ○​ But are those memories accurate? Hard to study, and verify, these autobiographical memories specific to each person ​ Flashbulb memories ○​ Flashbulb memory: memory for the circumstances in which one learned about a highly public, emotionally arousing event ​ Not (semantic) knowledge of the event itself, but how you first heard about it (usually an emotional experience) ​ Often events that shape identity ○​ Hard to study this type of event in the lab, have to rely on natural events ○​ Study proposed that extreme, emotional events lead to memories that are highly detailed and resistant to forgetting ○​ One study compared flashbulb memory for 9/11 with memory of personal event the same week ​ Followed up 7 days, 42 days, or 224 days later ​ Dependent measures: ​ Number of consistent/inconsistent details ​ Strength of belief ​ Feeling of recollection ○​ Another study examined memory for 9/11 at four timepoints: ​ 2001 (2 weeks following 9/11) , 2002, 2004, 2011 ​ Separately measured recall of personal experience (flashbulb memory) and factual details of the event (event memory) ​ Compared to the first session, about 60% of responses were consistent at later sessions  ​ Consistency is stable, incorrect details persist over long time periods ​ Compared to flashbulb memory, accuracy of factual event memory improved over time ​ Despite large number of inconsistencies, high confidence in accuracy of memory ○​ Flashbulb memories are susceptible to forgetting and distortion just like other autobiographical memories, but people view them as life changing events that they’ll never forget ​ Continued (mistaken) confidence in the accuracy of memory ○​ Flashbulb memories are a special class of collectively shared memories ​ Highly emotional for large groups of people ​ Subject to continued media coverage and retelling ​ Contribute to collective and personal identity ​ The amygdala (watch video) ○​ Indirect pathway through the cortex: slower, but more detailed processing of stimulus/situation; allows us to alter emotional response ○​ Direct pathway from thalamus to lateral nucleus: rapid response to potential threats ○​ Release of stress hormones leads to enhanced activation of amygdala which then modifies the encoding of the memory by the hippocampus ​ The amygdala and emotional memory ○​ Like the hippocampus, the amygdala is not involved in directly storing the content of emotional memories ○​ The amygdala modulates the activity of other brain regions involved in memory encoding and retrieval ​ Emotional arousal leads to amygdala activation leads to enhanced encoding of declarative memory ○​ How can we test whether the amygdala is necessary for emotional enhancement of memory? ○​ Lesions of the amygdala block emotional enhancements of memory ​ A study examined memory for images and accompanying narrative between healthy control participants and people with surgically removed amygdalae ​ Patients with lesioned amygdala had normal ratings of valence and arousal for stimuli ​ But poorer memory a day later, in particular, no enhancement for emotional stimuli compared to neutral stimuli ○​ In healthy people (with intact amygdala), amygdala activation is correlated with perceived arousal and subsequent memory ○​ Amygdala activation in responses to emotional stimuli is generally higher among affective disorders  ○​ In a study, participants administered a drug (propranolol) that blocks the effect of stress hormones on the amygdala ○​ Compared memory for emotional and neutral slideshow between two groups of participants: propranolol and placebo group ​ Summary ○​ Lesions of amygdala disrupt emotional processing and the memory enhancement for emotional stimuli ○​ Degree to which amygdala is activated correlated with perceived arousal and later memory for an emotional stimulus ○​ People with disruptive emotional responses tend to exhibit stronger activation of the amygdala relative to healthy control participants ○​ Blocking the effect of stress hormones on the amygdala also reduces or eliminates memory enhancement for emotional stimuli ​ PTSD ○​ Characterized by intrusive memory and symptoms of stress and avoidance due to experience of trauma ​ Normal reactions to trauma, but abnormally persistent ○​ But only a fraction of people who experience trauma subsequently develop PTSD…why? ​ Neurobiological markers associated with PTSD include smaller hippocampal volume and greater responsivity of the amygdala ​ But do these reflect predisposition for developing PTSD or the effects of trauma? ○​ A study examined the development of PTSD symptoms among people in the Boston area following the Boston marathon bombing ​ Recruited people who had previously taken part in brain imaging study on emotional processing (responding to neutral vs arousing stimuli) ​ In followup after bombing, participants completed a questionnaire about PTSD symptoms ​ Examined relationship between amygdala response to emotional stimuli to the development of PTSD symptoms after traumatic event ○​ Amygdala responses to emotional stimuli in the year prior to the event were positively correlated with self reported symptoms of PTSD ​ Suggests that abnormal functioning of the amygdala is a marker for increased risk of developing PTSD after trauma ○​ In addition to identifying risk factors for PTSD, drug therapy that disrupts emotional memory formation may reduce likelihood of developing PTSD after trauma ○​ A study recruited emergency room patients who experienced traumatic injury ​ When administered propranolol in week following injury, patients were less likely to develop symptoms of PTSD