Emotions & Cognition

Design Characteristics of a Goal-Seeking Biological System

• Detectors determine existence and urgency of needs, motive

• Means of prioritizing needs • Planning routines for pursuing the satisfaction of

motive, which necessitates– An attention controller – Working memory

• Detectors that enable dynamic planning

What is the role of emotions in a cognitive system?

• Human life as being guided – FIRST by biological needs – SECOND by motives and goals

• Emotions as connected to the basic biological mechanisms that evaluate the internal and external as either beneficial or harmful.

Emotional Categories as a Hierarchy

• Three levels – the basic, the superordinate and the subordinate.

• The basic as universal, biologically based and innate

• The superordinate as a positive/negative polarity for categorizing emotions

• The subordinate as a process of differentiation and integration of basic level emotions.

EMOTIONSPositive Negative

Love Joy Anger Sadness Fear

Fondness Bliss Annoyance Agony HorrorInfatuation Contentment Contempt Grief

Worry

Taxonomies of Emotions

• Are all 600 affective words in the English language distinct emotions?

• Johnson-Laird & Oatley Taxonomy – Basic emotions as being at either the

frustration or activation of goals.

Taxonomies of Emotions

• Ortony, Clore & Collins Taxonomy– Internal and external conditions that may

cause emotions– Mental and nonmental conditions– States as different from traits– Emotions as distinguished by attentional

focus of affect– Events– Agents– Objects

Emotions, Anomolies and Memory

• Expectation failures as enormously important in learning theories

• Schank describes learning as occurring ONLY when mistakes occur - respond correctly and no learning occurs

• When plans are frustrated, action is typically taken to bypass the frustration and develop plan for avoiding reoccurance. This process is typically encoded with emotions that help to drive action.

3 Roles of Emotions in Directing Learning

• Emotions accompany failed expectations• Emotions mobilize attention• Emotions can lead to recycling

Distinction between Mood and Emotion

• Emotions as reactions - Short duration, identifiable cause, bodily reactions

• Moods as subtle – longer duration, less intense, framing experience

Memory and Mood

Memory and Mood--Is the relationship between mood and memory trivial? Or obvious?

--A strong positive correlation exists between memory and mood.

-specifically, you will recall an emotional memory with more vividness and consistency than you would an unemotional memory. (Reisberg & Heuer, 1995)

-Not necessarily more accurate.

Why are emotional events more vivid?

Easterbrook Hypothesis

Easterbrook, (1959); Christianson & Safer, (1996).

!

Easterbrook Hypothesis--Criticisms:

-What exactly is “central” as opposed to “peripheral?”

-Depending on one’s expertise, may attend to things differently.

-What is stressful for one person, may not be stressful for another.

Easterbrook, (1959); Christianson & Loftus, 1987; Christianson & Safer, (1996).

Optimal amount of stress

Deffenbacher (1983); Ebbesen & Konecni, 1997

Mood disorders and Memory

Williams,1992;1986; Williams & Broadbent, 1986; Mineka & Nugent, 1995; Teasdale & Fogarty, 1979

Depression

--Tend to remember less specifics

--Tend to recall more negative information.

--Tend to recall more self-referential inferential

--Take longer to respond to positive stimuli

Mood congruent bias: tendency to remember stimuli that is congruent or the same as one’s mood.

Mood disorders and Memory

MacLeod & Mathews, 1991; Mineka & Nugent, 1995; McNally, Foa, & Donnell, 1989; Becker, Rinck, & Margraf, 1994; Williams, Watts, MacLoed, and Mathews (1988)

Anxiety

--Tendency to attend to threatening stimuli.

--No tendency to remember threatening material, even for phobics.

--Some discrepancy found between GAD and panic disorder.

Activation/integration vs. elaboration

Mood Congruence

Bower,1992; Bower, 1983; Forgas & Bower, 1987

--Given an emotional state (happy, sad, excited, anxious…) people will give more attention to stimulus events, objects, or situations that are affectively congruent with that emotional state.

Mood Congruence

Bower,1981

Bower’s Semantic Associative Network model

Happiness SunshinePuppies

Walking dogGetting

Sunburn

Mood Dependent Retrieval

Bower, 1992

--Memories that subjects store when they are in one emotional state are more retrievable later if they re-renter that SAME emotional state. Recall is worse if they attempt to recall in a different emotional state.

--Mood dependent retrieval is NOT always replicable.

Why?

= PEACE = PEACE =?????

Mood Dependent Retrieval

Eich, 1980; 1990; Eich & Metcalfe, 1989

--Depends on 4 certain things:

Eric Eich

--Moods induced during encoding and retrieval must be intense and similar.

--Free recall

--Autobiographical material

--Internally generated learning material

How are moods generated?

Velten, 1968; Sinclair, 1997; Eich, 1995

Velten Approach:

Eich’s Continuous Music Technique:

Movies (Gross)

I feel like I’m on pins and needles today

I’m so worried, I can’t concentrate on anything

Gross’ films

Happy Sad

If you would like samples of these songs for your presentation, please contact Katherine Aumer-Ryan: aumerryan@mail.utexas.edu and she can help you out.

Why does this matter?

Jones,1999; Loftus

Questions:

Eye-witness testimony

“Most of the time I feel blue.”

“I get angry sometimes.”

“Sometimes when I am not feeling well, I am cross.”

“I get anxious and upset when I have to make a short trip away from home.”

Memories for TraumaThe Debate

• In 1989, results from APA survey of experts in eyewitness testimony:– 79% said evidence was favorable to very reliable for claim that

“very high levels of stress impairs accuracy of eyewitness testimony.”

– 51% said evidence was favorable to very reliable that “eyewitnesses have more difficulty remembering violent than nonviolent events.”

• On the other hand, many top researchers (e.g., James McGaugh, Sven Christianson, Shobe & Kihlstrom, Lenore Terr) argue that trauma improves memory.

Why the discord?

• Flawed methodology

• Conceptual confusion

Does Trauma Impair Memory?evidence from the laboratory

• Violent versus non-violent film (Loftus & Burns)– The bank robbery

• Mutilated faces

Does Trauma Impair Memory?evidence from clinical reports

• Psychogenic amnesia– The occurrence of a traumatic event shuts down

autobiographical memory and episodic memory of the event, leading to total but temporary loss of personal information and memory of the event itself.

• Organic amnesia– Post-traumatic amnesia from an organic cause.

• Psychogenic fugue– Flee life and assume new identity

• Dissociative Identity Disorder

Does Trauma Improve Memory?evidence from the laboratory

• Boy and mother walk down the street (Larry Cahill & James McGaugh)

• Slides with an emotionally arousing story (Christianson & Loftus)

Does Trauma Improve Memory?evidence from real-world violence

• PTSD– Total inability to forget traumatic memories.– Likelihood of PTSD increases with repeated exposure

to trauma.– Higher arousal of sympathetic nervous system.– Traumatic memories occur in all-or-none fashion.– Focus on old memories can cause new memories to

be suppressed (i.e., PTSD patients have higher threshold for new memory consolidation).

– Nazi holocaust victims study

Resolving The Contradiction

• Memory is better for central detail than for peripheral detail.– Easterbrook Hypothesis - narrowing of attention during

emotional events (Easterbrook, 1959)

• Memory is better among victims than among bystanders.• Memory is better when tested after a delay than when

tested shortly after the trauma.• Memory is better when tested for recognition than recall.• Memory is better when the items to be remembered are

part of the trauma itself.

Is Traumatic Memory Ordinary?Two Camps

• Separate and qualitatively different memory system retains and retrieves knowledge of traumatic events.– Traumatic memory is usually accurate and subserved

by the amygdala that seems to have little effect on unemotional remembrance.

• Insufficient evidence exists to postulate about a separate memory system.– Traumatic memory differs in degree, not kind, from

ordinary memory.

Traumatic Memory - Neurobiology

How does strengthening of a memory occur?

• Synapses in the hippocampus, amygdala, and cortex make use of one of the most excitatory neurotransmitters, glutamate.

• Two properties of glutamate are critical to memory:– Synapses are nonlinear.– When a synapse has had a number of

superexcitatory stimulations, it begin to takes less of an excitatory signal.

Role of the Sympathetic Nervous System in Traumatic Memory

• Sympathetic nervous system kicks into high gear when hearing stressful story, being party to a stressful event.– Beta-blockers (Cahill et al., 1994)

• The SNS helps increase the energy needed to mobilize glucose into the bloodstream and increase the force with which blood is being pumped to the brain. (i.e., stress = increase delivery of glucose)

• SNS indirectly arouses the hippocampus by way of the amygdala.

Role of the Amygdalaa closer look

• Damasio study– 3 subjects: SM046 = bilateral damage to amygdala;

WC1606 = bilateral damage to hippocampus; RH1951 = bilateral damage to both

– Two conditioning experiments

– SM046: no ability to acquire conditioned SCR to CS but did not preclude acquisition of facts.

– WC1606: acquired conditioned SCR but no ability to acquire new facts.

– RH1951: halted both acquisition of SCR and new facts.

So, two different brain mechanisms or one?

Returning to the LeDoux model (aka “the low road”:

What happens if stress is prolonged?

• As mentioned, within seconds of onset of stress, glucose delivery throughout the brain increases.

• However, if stressor persists, glucose delivery is no longer enhanced, and returns to normal levels.

• If stressor goes on even longer, delivery of glucose to the brain is inhibited, particularly in the hippocampus.

• As time goes by, energy needs to be displaced, so that you can run on “automatic,” with implicit memory outposts doing the work.

Bringing it home…

Does trauma impair or enhance memory?– Well, the answer could be “both.”

• Stress makes your sensory receptors (e.g., smell, hearing, taste) more sensitive.

• Memory for trauma seems to be immediately enhanced for central images of the event.

• Narrative memory of the event, however, comes much later.

• In the heat of the moment, it makes most sense for energy stores to be diverted to a quick and easy, more primitive learning system that speeds up reaction time.

• But what about prolonged exposure to trauma? Is the jury still out?