Lecture Notes: How Cognition Affects Emotion and Vice Versa
Introduction
Focus: On the interplay between cognition and emotion, specifically the role of the frontal lobe in modulating emotional responses and how emotions can, in turn, affect cognition.
Key Theories: James-Lange, Bard, and Schachter-Singer theories of emotion.
Cognition Affects Emotion
Emotion Processing
Bottom-up processing: Automatic physiological responses (e.g., fight-or-flight when seeing a tiger).
Top-down processing: Cognitive interpretation of the situation (e.g., seeing a tiger on TV—no need to run).
Cognitive Appraisal
Concept: How we appraise or interpret the context affects the resulting emotion.
Examples: A person bumping into you and your emotional reaction based on whether they apologize or ignore you.
Lab Studies
Pictures: Participants react naturally vs. interpret negatively. Negative interpretations lead to higher amygdala activation and negative emotions.
Brain Activity: Top-down control involves regions like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex.
Emotion Regulation Techniques
Distraction: Effective in reducing negative emotions by occupying working memory with other tasks.
Cognitive Reappraisal: Modifying how you think about a situation to change its emotional impact.
Controlled Breathing and Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Basic methods to regulate unwanted emotions.
Distraction and Reappraisal Studies
Distraction: Hard math problems reduce negative moods and increase prefrontal cortex activity.
Reappraisal Techniques: Imagining negative pictures as photoshopped, seeing oneself in third-person, etc., reduce negative emotions and amygdala activation.
Emotion Affects Cognition
Memory Studies
Skydiving Study: Skydivers remembered more relevant (skydiving-related) words when learned in an aroused state.
Attentional Narrowing: Arousal can lead to better memory for situationally relevant information but worse for irrelevant information.
Mood State Dependent Memory: Recall is better when mood at learning matches mood at recall.
Decision-Making
Emotion and Decision-Making: Damage to emotional brain regions affects investment decisions. Healthy controls are influenced by previous trial outcomes.
Rationality vs. Emotion: Emotion-induced biases can make decisions seem irrational to outsiders, but they are essential for everyday functioning.
Specific Emotions and Decision-Making
Anxiety and Sadness: Lead to pessimistic judgments about future negative events.
Anger: Counter-intuitively associated with optimistic judgments about the future.
Positive Moods: Can lead to risk-aversion but effects depend on the type of positive mood.
Biases Induced by Emotions
Belief Bias: Tendency to accept conclusions we agree with, even if they are logically invalid.
Attentional Bias: Anxiety sufferers show selective attention to threat-related stimuli during tasks like the Emotional Stroop Task and Dot Probe Task.
Training to Reduce Emotional Biases
Dot Probe Task: Training alcoholics to pay attention away from alcohol-related stimuli can reduce their consumption.
Classical Conditioning: Phobias may arise from painful or negative experiences with specific objects or situations.
Systematic Desensitization: Gradual exposure to feared stimuli while remaining relaxed can change fear associations.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Symptoms: Persistent intrusive thoughts, nightmares, and anxiety after a traumatic event.
Stress Hormones: Dysregulated release systems can keep stress responses active, contributing to PTSD.
Propranolol: Can interfere with stress hormones and potentially reduce the likelihood of developing PTSD if administered after a traumatic event.
Identification of At-Risk Individuals
Smaller Hippocampal Volume: Correlated with higher susceptibility to PTSD. Twin studies suggest smaller hippocampi may be an inherent risk factor rather than a consequence of PTSD.