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58 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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What are the two main schools of thought in regards to the structure of emotions? |
1. Categorical approach- there are several distinct emotions (EX: happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness) **seems to fit our conscious experience 2. Dimensional approach |
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How do emotions and moods differ? |
- emotions typically last for less time than moods - moods are less intense than emotions and often fail to attract our attention - emotions are generally caused by a specific event, whereas the reason for being in a given mood is often unclear - BUT emotions can cause moods and vice versa |
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How are the two schools of thought in emotions reconciled? |
by a hierarchical model with two independent dimensions at the higher level and several specific emotions at the lower level. |
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How do cognitive systems influence emotional experience? |
1. the presentation of an aversive stimulus (EX: photo of a mutilated body) or a positive stimulus (EX: photo of a party scene) might produce emotion through low-level bottom-up processes involving attention and perception 2. emotion might be generated through high-level top-down processes involving stored emotional knowledge (EX: thinking about some future threatening event- an important exam- can create a state of high anxiety) |
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What brain areas were activated during bottom up conditions (EX: shown aversive photographs and told to view the images and respond naturally to them) in emotional experience? |
- occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes- associated with visual perceptual processing - strong activation of the amygdala- buried in the front part of the temporal lobe and is associated with several emotions- the level of self-reported negative affect was associated most strongly with activation here |
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What brain areas were activated during top-down conditions (EX: told to interpret neutral photographs as if they were aversive) in emotional experience? |
- dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex- areas associated with high-level cognitive processes - anterior cingulate and amygdala were also activated - level of self-reported negative affect was associated most with activation of the medial prefrontal cortex- involved in producing cognitive representations of stimulus meaning |
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What is appraisal? |
it is the evaluation or judgment that we make about situation relevant to our goals, concerns, and wellbeing, and it typically involves top-down processes |
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What is the appraisal approach? |
emphasizes the importance of appraisal in determining which emotion we experience in any given situation |
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How does cognitive appraisal influence whether we experience guilt or anger in a given situation? |
- guilt when the situation is related to our personal commitments, our goals are blocked, and we blame ourselves for what has happened - anger when the situation is related to our personal commitments, our goals are blocked, and we blame the other person for what has happened (other accountability) |
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How does deliberate conscious processing (reasoning) differ from automatic processing without conscious awareness? |
- appraisal based on reasoning is slower and more flexible than appraisal based on memory activation |
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What is affective blindsight? |
different emotional stimuli can be discriminated in the absence of conscious perception |
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What is emotion regulation? |
the use of deliberate and effortful processes to change a spontaneous emotional state (usually a negative one) - EX of emotion regulation include cognitive reappraisal, use of distraction, controlled breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, stress-induced eating. |
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What is the process model?
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- it allows us to categorize emotion-regulation strategies - based on the assumption that emotion-regulation strategies can be used at various points in time
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What is an example of situation selection in emotion regulation? |
a socially anxious person avoiding potentially stressful social situations |
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What is an example of situation modification in emotion regulation? |
a socially anxious person bringing a friend to accompany them |
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What is an example of attention deployment in emotion regulation? |
a socially anxious person focuses on pleasant distracting thoughts |
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What is an example of cognitive change in emotion regulation? |
a socially anxious person uses cognitive reappraisal to reinterpret the current situation |
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What is response modulation? |
rather than being best to express your angry thoughts in order to get them out of system, expressing anger in fact increases rather than decreases angry feelings since it facilitates the retrieval of angry thoughts |
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What is attentional deployment? |
changing your emotional state by distraction or by attending to something else - a good way of reducing a negative mood state |
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How does distraction reduce negative affect? |
- the working memory system plays a central role - working memory (involved in the processing and storage of information) has limited capacity, if most of this capacity is devoted to processing distracting stimuli, there is little capacity left to process negative emotional information |
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What is attentional counter-regulation? |
- it involves the use of attentional processes to reduce positive and negative emotional states - we attend to emotionally positive information when in a negative emotional state and to negative information when in a positive emotional state |
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What is cognitive reappraisal? |
reinterpreting the meaning of a stimulus to change one's emotional response to it |
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What are two types of the reappraisal strategy? |
1. Reinterpretation: involves changing the meaning of the context in which a stimulus is presented (EX: imagining a picture has been faked) 2. Distancing: involves taking a detached, third person perspective |
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Is reappraisal or distraction better at reducing negative affect and why? |
- reappraisal - probably because it is associated with more cognitive control of the individuals emotional state |
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What are two reasons for why it is important to assess the effects of emotion and mood on cognition and performance? |
1. mood states can have strong influences on behavior in everyday life EX: the effects of mood when listening to music while driving on driving performance 2. there have been many studies concerned with the effects of mood on cognition and performance on a very wide range of tasks- assessing memory, judgment, decision making, and reasoning- and mood has generally influenced performance - we can only obtain a complete picture of human cognition by understanding the impact of mood states and emotion |
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What is attentional narrowing? |
- based on Easterbrook's hypothesis - increases in arousal or anxiety produce a narrowing of attention in which fewer aspects of the environment are processed thoroughly |
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How does emotion influence our memory? (According to Levine and Edelstein) |
emotion enhances our memory for information central to our current goals but impairs it for peripheral or unimportant information |
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What else does attentional narrowing depend on other than emotion? |
- motivation - anxiety produces attentional narrowing because in involves high motivational intensity as well as negative affect - sadness (a negative mood state associated with low motivational intensity) led to attentional broadening rather than narrowing - disgust (a negative mood state associated with high motivational intensity) produced attentional narrowing - the presence or absence of high motivational intensity is important |
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What is mood-state-dependent memory? |
the finding that memory performance is better when the individual's mood state is the same at learning and retrieval than when it differs |
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Why was mood-state-dependent memory not found with cued recall? |
- mood state exerts less influence when crucial information is explicitly presented- as with cued recall - memory is most likely to be mood-dependent when effortful processing at learning and/ or retrieval is required- the "do it yourself" principle |
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What is mood congruity? |
emotionally toned information is learned and retrieved best when there is agreement (or congruity) between its affective value and the learner's (or rememberer's) current mod state |
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What is Urback-Wiethe disease? |
- a disease in which the amygdala and adjacent areas are destroyed - leads to the impairment of emotional processing and memory for emotional material |
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Of all the emotional states, which is most consistently associated with pessimistic judgments about the future? |
fear or anxiety |
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What are the effects of anxiety on decision making? |
- it slows learning - perform worse on decision making tasks that involve explicit rules that require the use of executive processes |
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Why does anxiety impair decision making? |
- many decision making tasks involve the use of the working memory system, especially the attention-like central executive component - anxiety impairs the efficiency with which the central executive is used when performing complex tasks |
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Why is anxiety associated with risk aversion? |
- anxious individuals are pessimistic about the likelihood of negative future events - anxiety is often triggered by high uncertainty and low personal control over a situation- uncertainty can be minimized by making "safe" decisions |
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How does sadness effect decision making? |
- those in sad mood state are more likely to choose high risk options |
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Why does sadness lead to choosing high risk options? |
- they attach more importance to the outcome - EX: when deciding which job to choose, place more importance on pay, choosing a riskier job with higher pay than a safe job with lower pay - sad individuals experience the environment as being relatively unrewarding and so they are especially motivated to obtain rewards |
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What is schadenfreude? |
experiencing pleasure at the misfortune of disliked others - anger increases this, increasing positive affect rather than negative affect which it is typically associated |
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How does anger relate to judgments? |
- anger is associated with relatively optimistic judgments - EX: angry people are more likely to experience divorce, to have problems at work, and to have heart disease, but they rate themselves as less at risk |
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Why is anger associated with optimistic judgments? |
- differs from other mood states in that it is associated with a sense of certainty about what has happened and with perceived control over the situation |
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What are the effects of anger on decision making? |
- among men (but not women) increased anger is associated with increased risk-taking - anger is believed to impair our ability to think straight |
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Why does anger impair decision making? |
- it leads to shallow processing based on heuristics rather than systematic or analytic processing - However, does not always lead to shallow or heuristic processing, studies show that angry participants are more persuaded by strong rather than weak arguments, indicating that they engaged in analytic or systematic processing |
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When does anger lead to shallow processing based on heuristics? |
low levels of anger may be associated with analytic or systematic processing, whereas extremely high levels of anger and arousal may prevent such processing from occurring |
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How does positive mood effect decision making? |
- those in a positive mood generally perceive the likelihood of negative events happening to them as smaller than individual in a sad or anxious/ fearful mood state- however the effects may be weak - also leads people to adopt a less risky decision making approach |
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Why does positive mood lead to risk aversion? |
those in a good mood are motivated to maintain their good mood |
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What are the effects of positive mood on decision making? |
- positive moods speed up learning - positive moods are associated with a tendency to process information in a more heuristic or shallow manner- however research on this assumes that it is the same for all positive mood states when in fact studies show that some positive mood states lead to less shallow or heuristic processing |
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What are the two main ways in which the effects of emotion on deductive reasoning can be assessed? |
1. Groups differing in emotion can be formed using mood manipulation techniques to induce negative, positive, or neutral mood states 2. The emotionality of the content used for a reasoning task can be manipulated (EX: participants can reason about neutral topics or emotionally charged ones) |
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How does emotion effect deductive reasoning? |
it disrupts the rational thinking needed for success in deductive reasoning |
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Why does emotion impair reasoning? |
- the answer varies from one emotion to another - anxious people are easily distractible and devote some of their attention to task-irrelevant thoughts- using up some of the central executive component, an attention-like component of the working memory - depression is associated with rumination (persistent focusing on symptoms of distress) which is associated with impaired performance on various cognitive tasks - however emotion isn't always associated with impaired reasoning performance |
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When can depression lead to enhanced reasoning performance and why? |
- depression can produce enhanced reasoning performance when the task is relevant to depression - depressed individuals possess far more information about depression than do non depressed ones |
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How is anxiety related to the belief bias? |
- anxious people are more likely to show the belief bias than the non anxious when presented with syllogisms related to their social concerns and worries - anxious people took longer to produce the correct answers with syllogisms involving a conflict between validity and believability than when there was congruence |
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What biases may increase vulnerability to clinical anxiety and/or serve to maintain an existing anxiety disorder? |
attentional bias and interpretive bias |
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What is the attentional bias? |
the selective allocation of attention to threaten-related stimuli when they are presented at the same time as neutral ones |
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What is the attentional bias dependent on? |
- a threat-detection mechanism that is largely automatic and is activated by threat stimuli presented subliminally (below the level of conscious awareness) - also depends on a difficulty in disengaging attention from threat-related stimuli that is a mixture of automatic and controlled processing |
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How can we reduce attentional biases? |
- attentional training - however attentional training may only change later or more controlled stages of threat processing but not early or more automatic ones |
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What is interpretive bias? |
the tendency to interpret ambiguous stimuli and situation in a threatening fashion - most likely to exhibited by anxious people |
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What is an important issue when concerned with the stage of processing at which an interpretive bias occurs in anxious individuals? |
- both (or all) meanings of an ambiguous word or sentence are activated initially, with anxious individuals favoring the threatening interpretation at a late stage in processing - OR, anxious individuals may select the threatening interpretation relatively early in processing ** more evidence supports this or that it occurs at both beginning and later on |
