all right so now we'll zoom out a little bit and look at some more behavioral type data regarding how cognition affects emotion in this you know the frontal lobe being able to modulate we call it appraisal emotional responses based on how situations are appraised and look at how emotion affects cognition which of course we have already been doing with the example of memory but a little more generally so emotion is affected and we talked about this a little bit at the beginning of the lecture with that James not James lang not barred Schechter singer theory or the bard someone whatever that theory of emotion where emotion is the end result of both some automatic processing that happens right a fight-or-flight response if you see a tiger charging at you it is pretty impossible to not have an automatic physiological response in your body that makes you feel afraid and want to run that would be an example of bottom-up processing top-down processing is how you interpret the situation so in that situation hopefully your top-down processing is going yeah this is trouble we got to get the hell out of here and then you're going to feel afraid but if you are seeing this on a movie screen or a television a top-down processing you is telling you okay this is not something to worry about we don't need to run and the emotion that you finally experience is of course affected by both of these streams one might call bottom-up the other top-down for example if someone bumps into you on the street how do you interpret that cognitively effects the emotion you will feel you can I don't know how they captured this totally candid Rando not staged moment in this photo but those two need to get a room so they you you bump into someone on the street like that I don't know anyway if you bump into some on the street you kind of look back and it's a blind person or someone who was says they're sorry or whatever you interpret it and go okay and you don't feel angry but if you look back and it's just someone who's too cool to get out of the way you feel angry so the point here is that how you will praise or interpret the context affects the emotion you feel and this has been studied in the lab of course people were shown pictures in this study and there were two groups one was told to just react naturally to these pictures you might consider this the more bottom-up group the other group was told to interpret these pictures as in a negative way as if they were a versiv so for example the picture on the left that guy's saying I had to kill this urge and now I'm gonna kill you and that's that's in the picture on the right you might say she's happy because how do you interpret that a negative way well she's just happy to have dumped you or whatever killed your family something like that I don't know point is what happened well you saw and that's where basically the bottom condition is where you're exerting top-down control right you are trying to influence your emotional response through pure dint of will top-down control by how you interpret the situation and in both conditions you saw amygdala activation but in the top condition amygdala activation scaled with self-reported negative emotion strength so that is when you're just reacting literally not surprisingly based on what we learned when your reaction is negative you see it is associated with amygdala activation then when your natural reaction is positive of course you see activation all over the brain for both of these conditions but interestingly in the bottom one you see more activation in guess what that's right the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex medial prefrontal cortex these brain regions associated with exerting control right this is the executive control center so when you are trying to modulate or change or affect your automatic responses to incoming stimuli this is associated with activation in the frontal lobe or control regions so of course if cognition can affect the motion and can we should use this perhaps to help control motions we don't want and we do some techniques that are used or distraction cognitive reappraisal a little bit but even more basic ones controlled breathing progressive muscle relaxation even stress induced eating know how cognitive that is but these are all methods that can be used certainly controlled cognitively to help regulate unwanted emotions all right stress just eating not all of them as good as others necessarily but some of these have been studied in the lab let's check them out so distraction basically just forcing yourself to think about something else is actually pretty effective not always easier said than done in many cases but it has been shown to work in the lab and you might think you know stop thinking about it obviously doesn't work or might not work very well but if you actually give someone something to do to fill up their working memory capacity occupy their lines that can reduce negative emotions for example these guys showed people strongly negative pictures in the lab to kind of induce a negative mood and then they created three groups that did math problems that were either very easy medium or hard in other words required or taxed working memory very little a medium amount or a lot and then they gave everybody a mood scale and found that the group that did the harder math that is that had to fill up their working memory with mathy stuff reported a better mood afterwards it's you know basically it makes sense if your mind is full you need it all to deal with math then you don't have any room in for it to maintain and ruminate about negative thoughts and not surprisingly the in the high demand hard math problem group showed greater activity in the prefrontal cortex and lower activity in the amygdala then this makes sense to obviously doing math is requires a lot of working memory capacity and executive function cognitive control associated with the PFC and there is sort of this inverse relationship between prefrontal cortex activation which is associated with exerting control over bottom-up automatic emotional responses and amygdala activation which is what is triggered by those or part of the trigger for those bottom-up automatic emotional responses another study here using a similar paradigm looked at both distraction and reappraisal so again participants were shown strongly negative pictures to induce a negative mood and one group then focused on remembering a six-letter string this was supposed to be the distraction group and then there was a reappraisal group and reappraisal here is about kind of reinterpreting the situations to make it less negative so there are various techniques that can be suggested in the lab to do this but an example is like you know maybe you've heard if you're suffering from anxiety first from speaking in front of people you're supposed to imagine the audience with no clothes on or in their underpants or something to take the embarrassing focus off of you and put it on them that's an example of reappraisal another is if you're looking at the while you're looking at these negative pics imagine that they're faked in Photoshop right that will blunt your emotional response or that they're you know stills from The Walking Dead or some Hollywood makeup thing or something another reappraisal technique is in order to help modulate an emotional response try to take a detached third-person perspective so I'll kind of pretend you're watching this from the corner of the room and it's not it's like a scene in a movie that you're not really in I don't I'm not an expert in coaching on how to use this technique but those are examples of reappraisal techniques so effortful cognitive strategies you might say aimed at reducing the emotional negative emotional response to negative emotional stimuli both groups showed reduced amygdala activation and reduced negative effect compared to a group that did nothing and the reappraisal group even more so than the distraction group so in this study he reappraisal worked even better than distraction by itself possibly because reappraisal is distracting as well right so you're distracted because you're busy doing this reappraising stuff in addition to that you the effects of the reappraisal going so it's kind of a double whammy and the reappraisal group had even more prefrontal cortex activation and even less amygdala activation than the distractor group suggesting that the reduced negative effect was reflected in the expected pattern of brain activity as well okay so we talked a little there about how cognition affects the emotion of course it's a two-way street motion affects cognition I mean cognition affects emotion how you appraise or interpret a situation of someone running into you will affect how angry you feel but at the same time if you are pissed off about something else when someone runs into you that is likely to affect how you appraise this situation so it's really silly to make a distinction between cognition affecting emotion and emotion affecting cognition but we have talked about how obviously memory for emotional material seems to be better in general and we can also look at how emotion affects memory and more nuanced ways for example here these guys did a study where skydivers learned a list of words either on the ground or in the plane right before jumping out of it and then later on the ground they were tested on the words to see you know hey if people are aroused when they encode a list of words are they gonna remember it better or what and it turns out that both groups remembered overall the same number of words so on the surface you might say oh looks like being aroused versus less aroused on the ground doesn't seem to have any effect on memory or encoding but it turned out and they look more closely that the lists contained well they set this up but the list contained Sky Ride sky skydiving relevant and skydiving irrelevant words so skydiving relevant words or situationally relevant words would be like you know jump splat fly pull wind propeller all that kind of crap rest you know skydiving irrelevant words or whatever chair dog whatever and what they found was that even though the total number of words were called was equal the people who learned the words right before jumping out of the plane remembered proportionally more of the jump relevant words compared to the jump irrelevant words and what they said was boom that's interesting maybe it's that when you're aroused like this you are more kind of focused specifically on the current situation that's in front of you and they said that you know they called this attentional narrowing so because you're so focused on this situation words that are relevant to this situation are encoded more strongly but because your attention is narrowly focused on this situation words that are irrelevant to it receive less processing and remember as well so this is an example of taking a little result in a memory test and creating a theory about it but it's been run with and there's some some evidence that it's got merit and of course people looked at other emotions to say well do all emotions cause this attentional narrowing and it turns out that no sadness for example actually leads to attentional broadening in other words when you're sad you focus relatively less on situation specific words and process situationally irrelevant words even more disgust leads to attention on their wing there's probably other emotions have been looked at to point here is that you understand what attentional inner wing is that it's an effect that emotion can have on that can cause an effect on memory performance or the types of things that are focused on and thus remember and it varies with different emotions all right I already mentioned this phenomenon like transfer appropriate processing or context effects or here it's called mood state dependent memory these are kind of all terms that refer to the same finding which is that similarity of the way you're thinking about something the context the cues around you and inside you similarity of all those things when you're studying or learn something and when you want to test it on something lead to better performance on a memory test right and like we said if you're this these data show exactly what I was talking about before if you look at the graph and upper right there's two learning conditions you're either sad or happy when you learn and there's two testing conditions you're either sad or happy when you're tested and you can see that this is a classic interaction so basically if you look at the bottom access mood at learning if you're happy when you learned well then you recall more of the words when you're happy then when you're sad the green line is happy at recall and the purple line is sad and recall of course if you are sad when you learned you recall more words when you're sad the purple line is higher and the green line so it's not you can't answer simply do people remember more when they're happy or sad according to these data it would suggest you'd have to ask well that depends were they happy when they learned or sad when they learned because what's more important is the match in context and mood is a very powerful piece of context between learning and recall so this bottom graph you don't really have to worry about that it's just showing that this tidy little effect we see on the top is very different if we change the type of memory test to a cue recall test which doesn't require as much effortful recall as the free recall test it's a little easier and in that case you don't see evidence of mood state dependent memory or these context effects but there's no real point there that's just that these data often when you're doing these studies you'll find stuff that doesn't make much sense you don't have an explanation for that just muddies the picture and ruins your ability to give a nice clear explanation of things and this is more an example of that than of anything that I want you to remember that important thing here is that you understand this top graph and how it demonstrates your take your time if you need to look at this so you understand it how it demonstrates that you recall more if you're sad if you were sad when you learned it the same thing is true of being happy then what does this remind you of I'm just talking about transfer appropriate processing and context affects emotion affects other aspects of cognition other than just memory of course for example decision-making here are some data demonstrating differences in decision-making between patients who have damage to emotion regions in the brain and then there's purple bars here show patients with damage their brain and non emotion regions just to show that the results that we see in the emotion region damage patients aren't just due to brain damage in general so it's kind of a control group and then the pinky bars are healthy controls and the task here is basically showing well you ask people hey do you want to invest on this trial or bet on this it's kind of like if I flip the coin it said hey you want to bet five bucks that this is heads or tails and what's shown here is the percentage of time that people say yes I'll invest or take a chance or bet based on whether they just won or just lost on the previous trial so if you look at the pink bars if people just invested on the previous trial in one they're more likely to invest on the current trial then if you look over on the right for the trials where they just invested or bet on the previous trial and lost so it's kind of like I don't know people get a nice lucky feeling by winning and they want to keep going more but if they just lost they feel unlucky or are less likely to invest but if you look at the green bars the patience with emotion region damage they are completely insensitive to whether they just won or lost on the previous trial it has no effect on their decision to invest and you see that the purple bar is pretty much follow the no healthy controls pattern so it's not just about brain damage then this is interesting because in fact the whether you just won or lost on the previous trial has nothing to do with whether you're going to win or lose on the present trial and so it's kind of an irrational thing that we see in normal people that what just happened on the previous trial affects their decision about what to do on the current trial so it's not here that the emotion region damage pattern is necessarily worse it's actually more rational but it's definitely abnormal most people are affected by what happened on the previous trial that effect is probably caused by emotion and the truth is emotion causes a lot of biases in cognitive processing and makes us act in non-rational ways or make decisions based on things that don't make any sense if you look at things based on purely reason however you might think that this would make peach people with emotion region damage better decision makers right because they can be more just like rational computers and not be swayed or affected by irrational emotion but the truth is and onyx which are they said technically is an ability to feel pleasure but you can think of it as people with impaired emotion processing or damage to emotion centers in the brain often have trouble making decisions and the reason even like silly little decisions about what peanut butter to buy at the store and the reason is when you go there right you don't care that much maybe you always buy the same peanut butter but think of something where you know you're buying it you don't usually buy it you have to pick between a couple things it's no big deal you just pick one right put in the basket well you might think it's no big deal and it might really be no big deal but really when you monitor people's subtle emotional responses to things it feels like you're picking one of those by random cuz you don't really care but in truth you are having very subtle emotional responses to this peanut butter and that peanut butter and your ability to pick one over the other is guided by these emotional responses that may be so subtle you don't even really notice them consciously they're only detectable if you you know monitor galvanic skin response or heart rate or all these things subtle physiological cues of emotion but what will happen is with people with impaired emotional processing they'll they can't make these they're overwhelmed by all these hundreds of little meaningless seemingly meaningless unimportant decisions that we all make every day and they'll sit there and equivocate over the peanut butter on this one's got less sugar this one cost list I don't know but if this one blah blah okay they break down and really have trouble functioning so it turns out that emotion processing even though it can lead us to be irrational actors sometimes is really important for our ability to make decisions from simple unassuming unimportant ones to big life-changing ones it's almost like if you don't have that emotion there you don't have a gut to follow emotion also affects judgments about the future for example anxiety and sadness are both associated with pessimistic judgments about the likelihood of negative events you're more likely to think the future is going to suck that might make sense both of those are negative emotions however you know they're not identical the anxiety makes you risk a verse and sadness not so much in fact apparently a little bit of the opposite the risk-averse means unwilling to take chances and that might make sense that's what the data is showing there over on the right you see people choosing the high-risk option in some paradigm and you'll see that the middle is neutral normal emotional state so to speak people picking about half the time however the anxious group chooses the high-risk option relatively very little that's because they're risk-averse and the sad group chooses the high-risk option even more than normal and this might make sense if you're sad I suppose why not you've got nothing to lose um and if you're anxious you're scared so it seems normally you might avoid risks but the point here is that you know obviously emotion affects cognition in a hundred different ways this is just another example anger is actually an interesting one because generally considered a negative emotion right but counter-intuitively perhaps it actually leads to relatively optimistic judgments about the future so you feel better more optimistic about what's likely to happen in the future when you're angry than when you're not odd and then you think about why this might be I think it helps to think about why we evolving or what is its function right it's to motivate us to act basically and acting on the environment is a way of control exerting control over things and the more control we feel we have over things life events the more optimistic we feel compared to you know if you're just a leaf that blows blows where the wind takes you and have no control of your future who knows the future is out of your hands something terrible could happen and you have nothing to do with it but if you are feeling like in control of things and motivated to do stuff it makes you feel like you can control things and make them go as you want and thus feel more optimistic obviously I'm not recommending anybody feel angry all the time angry people have a higher risk of divorce problems at work heart disease but interesting they rate themselves as less at risk for these things reflecting that optimism I spoke of so kind of fits with that classic type a CEO kind of angry for three different wives red-faced heart of two heart attacks millionaire kind of stereotype of course high enough levels of anger make it hard for you to think straight or use your working memory capacity if you're too pissed off this at the bottom here was just describing a study where they had people pretend to be jurors and weigh the evidence in a case and this requires a lot of thinking if you're doing it well to weigh the subtle evidence there's a lot of different facts you gotta be rational and analyzing them and all this and they had two juries one that was really pissed off and one that wasn't and when they gave the not pissed off jury a secondary task to do that occupied some of their working memory capacity they didn't do as well on the jury evidence weighing tasks not surprisingly they that task requires working memory if you're using someone for something else you're not gonna have as much left over to do the jury task however adding a secondary task to the angry group had no effect on their performance in the jury task presumably because they weren't really using their working memory in the first place because they were so pissed off so adding some tasks that taxed working memory did not appear impair performance and a pissed-off people evidencing the fact that when you're really pissed off you're not really being careful about weighing evidence in any way anyway all right well we've focused so much on negative emotions people of course have studied positive mood as well and how that affects cognition interestingly it makes people more risk-averse so less likely to take risks as we showed before and that's not surprising I don't think right things are good why risk things are good right now let's just keep them the way they are why rock the boat so to speak but interestingly effects on decision-making depend on the type of positive mood so this particular study hereby gryska vicious I guess looked at the effect of mood on how what type of arguments were most effective in convincing people of stuff of persuading people and they looked at weak versus strong arguments and weak arguments depend on more shallow heuristic not careful analytic processing whereas strong arguments are blame present a lot of data and they're very rational they don't just like appeal to your emotions or anything like that so you might think for example a a week and a week argument to buy my well know a strong argument to buy my insurance Sergeant insurance would be an ad with a shield and then a list of all the facts like we have low rates companies are coverage and we're in 50 states above all these facts right you have to use working memory be motivated process all this stuff wait in order to take advantage of the strong argument or be convinced by it a weak argument an example in an ad for an insurance company would be like a baby holding a cookie and sitting on a puppy or some crap like that sergeant insurance for your family that's it because everyone likes babies the babies and cookies and puppies have anything to do with my insurance company no it's ridiculous but it makes you feel good and you go I want that anyway what risk a vicious found is that positive mood did affect which type of arguments were more effective but it depended on the specific type of positive mood for example if you're feeling anticipatory enthusiasm amusement or attachment love you're more persuaded by weak methods the cookie and the baby in the puppy anticipatory enthusiasm is like or almost almost course and then we're gonna go to Disneyland catch Koba 19 or Oh something greats coming up we're going to a concert or something amusement would be what you feel when I make a funny joke in my lectures I said professors so amusing attachment love might be what you feel for your mom anyway and all those shades of positive mood one is more likely to be convinced by weak arguments however if one is feeling ah like so many stars in the universe or nurture at love which you might feel for your baby you're more likely to be convinced by strong arguments why is that I don't know kind of interesting you can I guess you could make sense of it if you wanted but the point here is just that positive mood effects decisions that you make how you evaluate data and interestingly first of all people have bothered to identify such subtle differences between different positive moods and perhaps even more surprisingly those subtle differences have real effects on how you evaluate information all right back to the negative emotions like anxiety these can lead to biases right so I mentioned how emotions can make us you know non rational actors this is one example here called belief bias the tendency to accept invalid conclusions don't follow logically from the premises simply because we may agree with those conclusions coming into it so this is kind of you have to think about this in them if anyone's taken philosophy and done logic it's that kind of crap if a then B and C so if a and C then what crap like that but here's an example never mind that all cats are animals business premise 1 and so basically your job here suggests logically assess the truth of the conclusion based on the premises others find person 1 less capable than person - got it premise 2 others find person 2 less capable than me got it conclusion others find me less capable than person 1 true or false is that supported by the premises or not right it's kind of a logic problem and the point here is that based on the premises this conclusion is not supported in the father's find one less capable than two so twos the most capable so far and two is less capable than me so in this according to these premises me is the most capable person here and that is obviously not support the conclusion that others find me less capable than person one however anxious individuals take longer to get this right and because they find the conclusion more believable just taken by itself this is why it's called belief bias they believe they are worthless crap and that others are generally more capable than they are okay and because of this they have trouble logically assessing these premises and we'll stick with talking about anxiety sufferers here because they provide a nice clinical application as we learn about more biases emotional related biases mmm attentional bias and interpretive bias so attentional bias an example here is an anxious individuals show selective attention to threat related stimuli when presented along with neutral stimuli so he doesn't have to be anxiety so first you could have you know baseball lovers show attentional bias with any time they see a baseball bat or something they're all interested in it and their attention is grabbed by it right if you don't quick care about baseball your attentions and glides right over that and it doesn't get captured interpretive bias in a for example and anxious individuals tend to interpret ambiguous stimuli in situations in a threatening way and we'll see examples of both of these that'll clear them up first we'll talk about attentional bias so here's a demonstration of attentional bias in emotional stroop task which is a cool kind of modification of the Stroop task and one of many I would point out the Stroop task has been used like tweaked in certain ways to examine all sorts of different things it's a really cool paradigm you'll remember the basic Stroop task you see a word and you're supposed to name the ink color that's it when the word says a color that is different than the ink color you slow down a little bit the to come interfering or competing incongruent colors interfere with each other and that affects performance a little bit compared to when the word is neutral or the same says the same color as the ink in this particular task there's an additional condition where you've got a stress-related word so their bottom example you see the word stress and the answer obviously is purple but anxiety patients are slower to say purple there than on anxiety sufferers why because attention is captured by that anxiety related stimulus stress they can't help but pay attention to it which detracts takes attention away from the task at hand which is ignoring suppressing meaning of the word and just naming the visual ink color and this can happen even when stimuli are presented subliminally that is people don't even aren't even consciously aware of perceiving something their attention can still be captured by stimuli that are relevant for where they're at and unfortunately for anxiety sufferers that would mean negative for anxiety related stimuli here's another example of a task demonstrating attentional bias with people's behavior so this is a dot probe task and what basically happens here on each trial you fix it your eyes on the cross in the middle of the screen an image or a word some stimulus appears one on each side of fixation you just keep your eyes in the middle of the whole time and then one of the two stimuli is replaced by a dot and your job is to just press the button on the side that corresponds to where the dot appeared right pretty easy so in the top if you saw those two stimuli and then a dot appeared behind the chair the right button would be correct if the dot appeared behind the booze the left button would be correct so what's interesting here and you do you know hundreds of trials right and calculate the mean reaction time and on average addict's for example in the top example would be alcoholics are we may guess faster on trials where the dot appears behind where the booze was than they are if the dot appears behind where the chair or some other neutral stimulus was compared to non alcoholics why because the booze captures their attention and again visually I haven't said this yet but visual attention is different than where you point your eyes usually if you want to pay attention to something in the visual world you point your eyes to it I'm not necessarily look at the cross and focus your attention on the beer you can do that point being you can separate your attention to visual stimuli from where you point your eyes your fovea anyway because automatically and unconsciously perhaps and maybe consciously as well booze related stimuli capture the attention of alcoholics do two attentional bias they respond better when that then becomes the relevant location for respond the dot probe tasks similarly the bottom example here anxiety sufferers are perform better when the dot appears behind threat related stimuli like the word harm than neutral stimuli like the word charm I've been chair compared to non and anxiety sufferers so this task also demonstrates attentional bias any guesses on how we might use this task to help alcoholics and anxiety sufferers you can pause it and think about it I'm moving on three two one well here's how have people do this task over and over and over and over and for example for alcoholics always have the dot appear behind the non alcohol-related stimulus the neutral word or stimulus a picture and these guys actually did that six hundred trials I told you a lot of trials but each one takes a couple seconds doesn't that goes fast these research researchers actually showed a reduction in attentional bias towards the harmful or alcohol-related stimuli that is people were no longer as much slower for responding when the dot appeared behind the alcohol as when it appeared behind the chair as before they did this it's almost as if they trained the unconscious implicit mind to pay attention away from the alcohol or negative stimuli the reward that is getting it correct and getting it correct quickly came from paying attention to not where the alcohol was the other side because they rigged it so that the dot more often or always appeared behind the non alcohol-related stimulus and what I think is striking they actually showed reduction in consumption of alcohol from 60 units a week to 50 which is still a lot of alcohol but still it's an actual change just by having people come into the lab and play this video game basically and this reduction held three months out so I think this is very interesting because it illustrates one of the themes of this course and that I try to impress on people which is how much of your behavior and life is affected without your awareness by the amazing amount of processing implicit processing and unconscious activity in the brain that you have any knowledge of so if you just tell people who come in alcoholics hey don't pay attention to that alcohol stuff just try to pay attention away from it that won't work right you kids not something that the conscious mind can do that would be ridiculous but this isn't necessarily one of those conscious kind of things attentional bias is an implicit automatic thing that is beyond people's control that doesn't mean though that you can't train that part that system that implicit learning system it's just that it learns a lot slower and it doesn't learn cognitively and consciously the way that the explicit system does it learns through repetition and just absorb statistical regularities in the environment and if the reward getting the dot probe task right always comes from paying attention away from alcohol implicitly your mind learns this and it actually has effects on behavior reduces the amount of alcohol you drink out in the world how long this effect might last need some more working stuff but still pretty interesting study all right let's do a little demonstration here when you see these words write down the first word that comes to mind this is like a free association task okay if you think about it too much and try to and you toss out of work because you don't like it you've ruined the task you really just have to put the first thing that pops into your head I'm not even gonna stay on the words long enough for you to second-guess okay so for each one get that first word first that pops into your head and write it down ready three two one right now that one get it do it write it don't think do it all right ready ready ready ready ready ready ready go ahead write down five this has been ruined by an overrated band ready go okay all right so what am i demonstrating there those were all stimuli in this case words that have more than one meaning and those multiple meanings of those multiple meanings some or one can be considered more positive or neutral while another is more negative so for example for example strain you know if you wrote down spaghetti that's neutral if you wrote down you know stress or kid die or school or this class or whatever that's all negative and maroon means you can be marooned on a desert island or it's a color which would be neutral was another one like pink like if you wrote down fish that's neutral if you wrote down fail that's negative so if you're looking on your list there and it's all a bunch of negative words you're a negative creep no I'm kidding the point here is that these are the types of tests that are used to assess interpretive bias which is different than attentional bias interpretive bias is when you see a stimulus that's ambiguous and that it could be interpreted this way or that way interpretive bias is demonstrated for example by the anxiety sufferers are more likely on average with a giant list of those types of words to produce more of the negative meanings of those words that is the negative interpretations of things pop into their heads more quickly and readily than for non anxiety sufferers and you know this is kind of similar to that study I mentioned earlier where when people were sad and giving words and asked to just think of the first memory that popped into their heads they came up with sad memories more often than people were happy but here it's a little more clinically revelant because unfortunately anxious individuals interpret ambiguous stimuli as negative all the time right for non anxious individuals or just regular people non anxiety sufferers they also show interpretive bias and interpret it interpret ambiguous stimuli is more negative when they're anxious like right before they take a test or have to give a speech or they're stressed for something they'll show interpretive bias but it's situational you're supposed to feel stressed before a test or something challenging what's so tragic about the anxiety disorders is that those people feel like that all the time or way way too much and if you think about it it's a vicious cycle because they're anxious so they interpret for example neutral faces which is what these pictures are supposed to show so if you show anxiety sufferers these pictures and ask them to you know rate the emotional valence of the pictures they will provide more negative ratings than non anxiety sufferers that is they interpret them more negatively and again this isn't a conscious kind of thing like oh I'm sad I think this is sad the faces literally look meaner and sadder than they do to non anxiety sufferers again especially with something like emotional processing of facial expressions you might think oh it's just the face we all see the same face ball a lot but now your brain creates what your eyes see more than your eyes just record a reflection of what's out there so when I say these faces they interpret these faces more negatively they literally see a different thing they see a more negative face and as you can imagine going around the word world and seeing a bunch of negative faces is likely to make you more anxious which is likely to cause more interpretive bias which is likely to make you more anxious so on and so forth other examples of ambiguous stimuli that could be interpreted more or less neutral way or a negative way I don't have to be pictures or words sentences to at the refugee camp the weak would soon be finished well if you hear that maybe it's Friday it's almost the weekend or maybe the weaker people are about to die the doctor examined Emma's growth maybe he's just checking to see how tall she is or maybe he's checking the goiter on her neck they discussed the priests convictions maybe he just really really believes in God or maybe he was convicted for molesting children okay you get the point so anxious people show interpretive bias they are more likely to interpret ambiguous stimuli in negative ways and this is an automatic process however it appears to take some time this one study showed that interpreter bias didn't show up for a couple seconds that doesn't mean that they have control over it but it may reflect that it happens a little later in processing not a very important detail so another example of how interpretive bias can contribute to in this case the problems associated with panic disorder it might not be for example that people with panic disorder have exaggerated responses to stress for example like you have to give a speech right so much panic disorder might freak out and it might be because their autonomic fight-or-flight nervous system kicks into gear ten times stronger than anyone elses and their heart rate races baba but it might just be that they have a normal response they you know they have a slight elevation and heart rate but they interpret this elevation and heart rate in an exaggerated panicky way which then feeds into that whole loop the heart rate really does increase they panic more etc etc so interpretive bias can actually contribute to the symptoms that for example some of my panic disorder experiences in this way so can we train people to show less interpretive bias the same way we trained them to show less attentional bias with that dot probe task and the alcohol in the chair yeah so these guys one group here had social phobics give a speech which is a terrifying thing to do for a social phobic and they then showed the videotape the speech and half of these social phobics they showed after the speech their video tease a video the videotape of them giving the speech and then they have them give another speech and they rated their anxiety and stress and freaking out before the second speech and anxiety was reduced prior prior to the second speech in the group that saw the video tape of their first speech and this might seem counterintuitive at first because they are social phobic and that might freak them out but part of having one of these phobias and this isn't just like normal anxiety about a speech this is really freaking out is a disconnect a Mis appraisal of reality they literally perceive the world in a way that is inconsistent with objective reality and when you show them the video sure maybe it wasn't the best beach in the world you're obviously nervous but did you see everybody else's speech everybody sucks at this it's not that bad your heads not on fire even though when you were giving the speech it felt like you were literally being hated by everybody in the world and your face was exploded and you were the ugliest thing that ever happened that's what it feels like but when you watch it you are faced with the reality that it wasn't that bad the world wasn't exploding nothing was on fire and this is an example of the kind of thing that this that cognitive psychologists do or the cognitive piece of cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT a behavioral piece we've talked about a lot it's about you know training implicit systems and forming associations of breaking maladaptive ones etc but the cognitive piece is like trying to bring people's assessment perception of reality more in line with objective reality because when you have one of these disorders it's way out of whack you think that giving a speech is in order to freak out that hard you really perceive it as the worst thing in the world so when you're forced to see that it's not it can actually help your interpretive bias of your situation before the next speech and then the second study down here they just train general anxiety disorder patients to produce non-threatening interpretations of ambiguous scenarios kind of like the dot product asked except here they show their ambiguous sentences or pictures or whatever and they said now instead of just interpreting these naturally with the first thing that comes into your head effortfully you know use top-down control get that frontal lobe involved and force yourself to interpret them in a positive or at least a neutral way and this seemed to reduce had some benefit of beneficial effects as well induce reduced interpreting interpretive bias in the future negative thought intrusions and worried even if you're fascinated by the stuff of course you can look those studies up we can look at a couple other clinical conditions through the lens of memory and emotion phobias for example of course are an overwhelming irrational fear of an object place or situation that interferes with your life I think typically or maybe not necessarily for example Oh Fidel video phobia for example fear snakes agoraphobia fear of open spaces bla bla bla and says best explain is arising through classical conditioning procedure where you know you see a snake and it bites you on the ankle and the previously neutral stimulus the vision of the snake becomes associated with the painful unconditioned stimulus the bite on the ankle and thus in the future you associate the snake with the pain and tada and this type of learning where you've got pain involved in the motion as we know can happen very quickly so you might say like yeah but people only have to be bitten once to become afraid of dogs or snakes or whatever and that is true but one trial can be enough for emotional learning or fear conditioning also you probably there are many instances of people who are afraid of snakes without ever having been bitten snapped by a snake at all in fact probably most people who are afraid of snakes so to some extent you can propose a sort of evolutionary explanation for phobias I mean there are certain things that we seem to have a biological predisposition to fear like snakes and it may well be that there was a random mutation that caused someone to be squeamish about snakes just naturally and they stayed away from them and because snakes can kill you that gene was selected for by evolution so we all have some well rather not all of us but the predisposition biologically to feel squeamish about snakes is hard baked into some DNA there it's also true that not everyone who has a fear evoking experience develops a phobia not everyone who's bitten by a dog is afraid of dogs or has a phobia for the rest of their lives obviously there's individual differences then we'll talk a little bit more about that but there's also possible that some phobia is so it's possible that it's learned through classical conditioning some of it may be you know inherited genetically and some may actually be learned or developed through social transmission fear of flying develops for example after reports of an airplane crash so even though you didn't suffer any physical harm or fear necessarily just reading about it might be enough to make you have a fear of flying and in fact they've seen that monkeys who may start off not afraid of snakes can actually become afraid if they see a neighbor react with fear to a snake so this kind of learning social learning may also play a role in the development of phobias and even though classical conditioning mechanisms may not be the full explanation for phobias we can use them to treat phobias and that's what systematic desensitization does it prevents successive approximations of the conditioned stimulus while the patient stays relaxed so if you have a fear of flying for example you might be well first your the procedure basically goes you learn to relax you use a very spring someone into a very safe calm office or clinic or whatever a clinical setting and use progressive relaxation techniques where you're like lie down relax completely put on new-age music and say first relax your toes now your ankles are melting the way all the tension is leaving your ankles you move through each body part like that and that can be very effective I'm sure some of you done that before so you get people you have to go with it obviously you came by you're not gonna relax me you have to want to relax and if that's the case then it can work so people train on this and get really good at that then they might introduce you once you're nice and relaxed to some little mild leaf flying related stimulus like to tell you a story about someone who takes a flight to visit their grandma or something like that while you're in this relaxed state and if you can if you freaking out we stop and go back and we do more relaxing but if you can deal with that and stay relaxed we increase it and telling you know maybe I show you a picture of a plane and then all the way up to actually putting on a VR helmet and you know really experiencing getting on a plug going down a gangplank whatever you call it a breezeway whatever it goes those things that go on planes sitting down buckling your seat looking out the window taking off and if you can finally do all that while maintaining this relaxed state you learn to associate those cues those conditioned stimuli which had previously been associated with freaking out with relaxed calmness and safety it makes it much more likely that you'll be able to actually go to the airport and see all that stuff without freaking out because we've changed the associations in your mind between those stimuli and freaking out two associations were covered them up rather with associations between those stimuli and being relaxed again it's not perfect but and we know you know original associations are hard to cover up but it is effective and can be successful in treating phoniest so that's systematic desensitization finally post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD obviously thinking about emotion and memory is very relevant for post-traumatic stress disorder which I'm sure you're all familiar with obsessive thoughts nightmares flashbacks persist long after exposure to some traumatic event may cause generalized anxiety disorder all sorts of stuff trouble concentrating and triggers are what we use to refer to stimuli that cause a recollection of original trauma or the emotions associated with it so for example of that you know may not have to hear a gunshot even someone you know fracking a book on a table may serve as a trigger and cause anxiety or even just clapping hands if that's the point is the triggers don't have to be just a done shot or some specific stimulus that was associated with the original traumatic event and the thing about PTSD is the individuals fail to extinguish or show normal extinction of the fear response so typically you know if you play associate a light and a shock or you associate a gunshot and getting a bullet in the leg if you show the light over and over without the shock then should we the fear response will extinguish and PTSD now that doesn't happen this is probably making you think of how extinction is context-specific but and that's true okay but set that aside some extent for this discussion and so that lack of extinction normal extinction in PTSD makes it really hard to treat and of course it may involve overactive stress hormones an example of that so if cortisol levels may remain high and persistent epinephrine may increase without corresponding cortisol release so the fear response lasts longer because it turns out the surge in cortisol is part of what shuts down the circuit so like fight-or-flight responses are meant to be physically activated meaning kicking the gear for a second and then shut down and stop right if they're chronically on like I said before the it's just really bad for your health the system blows out so the way it works is partly that a stressful stimulus triggers a release of these stress hormones including cortisol and it's this surge increase in concentration of those that prepares the body for fight and flight ba-ba-ba-ba-ba but they also these higher levels shortly thereafter trigger the system to shut down it's sort of like hey there's a lot of cortisol here and that triggers some mechanisms and say okay well really stop releasing cortisol however in PTSD that feedback loop that shutdown mechanism can be impaired which just kind of leaves the system on and the off switch is broken so to speak interestingly drugs like propranolol which interfere with epinephrine adrenaline and stress hormones can reduce a stress reaction and with administration after an event the patient may even be less likely to develop PTSD I think I hinted at this previously remember how the administration of epinephrine after fear conditioning strengthened conditioning that is when the rat went into a darkened box and was shocked if we gave them epinephrine half an hour later they were less likely to go into the box or waited longer before returning to the box than if we didn't give him enough room that is the epinephrine seemed to strengthen the fear memory well if and retrospectively right even if we waited half an hour so what if right after a traumatic event we gave someone a drug that interfered with epinephrine and epinephrine antagonists like propranolol could this dampen the negative emotional content of that memory or weaken the fear memory and the answer is yes and that's very interesting so should all soldiers for example carry around and propranolol and shoot it up every time something terrible happens that's a much messier question first of all most don't develop PTSD is it healthy to start tooling with natural memory systems so cavalierly or cavalierly at all interesting questions to consider this just demonstrates that you know most people don't develop PTSD after traumatic experiences so having everyone shoot up propranolol may not be wise here you can see that 35 to 55 percent of the population shows what is called resilience meaning after a traumatic event they experience disruptions and normal functioning due to having just experienced a traumatic event you know anxiety whatever all the symptoms that come with PTSD but you'll see that those are those symptoms are reduced over what you know looks like a month or two in general and they return pretty much to normal then there's a group the recoverers another additional 15 to 35 percent which show stronger disruption moderate disruption that might last little Yount longer looks like a year or a year and a half but by the time we get to about two years out they're back pretty much to normal and then of course the PTSD suffers 10 to 30 percent who suffers severe disruption due to the after-effects of the traumatic event and that lasts persists so what might be nice here is if we could identify individual individuals who are at risk for PTSD for example if we're going to give soldiers propranolol if we had some way to know which ones we needed to give it to you don't want to mess with memory systems and people who you don't have to mess with them but if we knew who is going to develop PTSD it might be worth any giving it a shot because PTSD is terrible to live with PTSD is associated with increased startle responses to loud noises increase their honest ISM avoidance people people with PTSD withdraw from novel situations and you might say well maybe we could test people beforehand to see identify those with larger startle responses or who score high on neuroticism perhaps they are more at risk for PTSD and perhaps they are but the problem is the chicken or the egg thing here just because PTSD is associated with these things we don't know if it's the PTSD causing these things or if these things existed before the PTSD and made people more likely to develop PTSD as people who happen to be high in neuroticism more likely to get PTSD that's what does PTSD just call neuroticism we're both another example of a correlate of PTSD is smaller hippocampal volume so MRI studies show structural MRI studies show that individuals with PTSD have smaller hippocampal volumes than normal and the big question of course is well does PTSD cause hippocampal shrinkage because we know that experience can literally change the size and shape of different brain regions remember that taxicab drivers in England who had increased hippocampal posterior hippocampal volume because of all those mental maps they had to remember violinists who have enlarged motor cortices associated with their left hands or do small hippocampal to start with put one at risk for PTSD so are those people just were they born with smaller hippocampus and thus they're more likely to develop PTSD there's actually an answer that question they did a study twin study right so they looked at veterans with PTSD and veterans without PTSD measured their hippocampus and the top slides there and you can see just eyeballing it that the hippocampus of the PTSD vets averaged across a bunch of events of course were significantly smaller but then they looked at the twins of both groups so obviously this is had to have twins and found that the twins of the vets with PTSD also had smaller hippocampus than the twins of brothers without PTSD suggesting that the smaller hippocampi predated the PTSD and thus it wasn't the PTSD that caused them it was actually more the story that produced hippocampi makes someone more vulnerable to PTSD why exactly is Oh another story and I'm not sure but this indicates that maybe hippocampal volume might be a reasonable way to identify subsets of the population that are more or less vulnerable to PTSD