Proposed Syllabus for Cognition and Emotion Lectures
Course Co-ordinator: Anne Richards (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Objectives
This course will provide an introduction to cognition and emotion. Behavioural and
neurophysiological research with both clinical and non-clinical populations will be
evaluated. The focus will be on anxiety and anxiety disorder. The course will examine the
literature on cognitive biases related to anxiety.
Learning Outcomes
At the end of this course, students should be able to:
 Critically evaluate the main theories in cognition and emotion.
 Have an understanding of the methodologies used in affective neuroscience
(behavioural and neurophysiological).
 Have an understanding of the cognitive biases associated with anxiety
Course Format
The course will be lectures.
Topics
Attention and Anxiety: The effects of anxiety on different types of attentional processes
(e.g., attentional capture and attentional control) will be evaluated. Issues such as whether
emotional processing requires attention will be examined, and the relationship between
top-down and bottom-up processes will be presented. Theories that have been proposed
to account for the research findings will be critiqued.
Lecture Outline
1. Biological and cognitive bases of anxiety
2. The role of maladaptive schemas in anxiety
3. Cognitive and neurobiological theories of anxiety disorders and experimental methods
used to investigate these
4. Evidence for attentional biases in Generalised Anxiety Disorder and Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder
5. The impact of reduced attentional control within PTSD and GAD.
6. Evidence that individual differences in working memory and attentional control
abilities impact on severity and/or experience of symptoms within these two disorders
7. Summary
Interpretation and Anxiety: An overview of research into interpretation biases and
ambiguity resolution will be presented. Issues such as the relationship between automatic
and strategic components in ambiguity resolution will be examined. A review of the
theories and methods used in this area will be presented.
Lecture Outline
1. Information processing biases
2. Interpretative biases
3. Beck’s Schema theory revisited
4. Bower’s (1981;1987) network theory
5. Investigations using behavioural experimental methods
6. Automatic vs. strategic processing
7. Training Effects
8. Context effects in interpretation
9. Neurobiology of threat interpretation
10. Summary
Suggested Reading
General Reading
Dalgleish, T., & Power, M. (1999). Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. John Wiley &
Sons Ltd.
Evans, D. (2001). Emotion: The Science of Sentiment. Oxford University Press.
Lane, R.D. and Nadel, L. (2000) Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion. Oxford University
Press.
Le Doux, J. (1996). The emotional brain. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Yiend, J. (2004). Cognition, emotion and psychopathology. Cambridge University Press.
Ward, L. (2006). The student’s guide to cognitive neuroscience. Psychology Press: Hove
Specific Reading
Bishop, S. (2007). Neurocognitive mechanisms of anxiety: an integrative account. Trends
in Cognitive Science, 11, 307-316.
Bishop, S. et al. (2004). State anxiety modulation of the amygdala response to unattended
threat-related stimuli. Journal of Neuroscience, 24, 10364-10368.
Blanchette, I. & Richards, A. (2003) Anxiety and the interpretation of ambiguous
information: Beyond the emotion-congruent effect. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, 132 (2): 294-309.
Blanchette, I. Richards, A., & Cross, A. (2007). Anxiety and the interpretation of
ambiguous facial expressions: The influence of contextual cues. Quarterly Journal
of Experimental Psychology. 60, 1011-1116.
Eimer, M. & Holmes, A. (2007). Event-related brain potential correlates of emotional
face processing. Neuropsychologia, 45, 15-31.
Eimer, M., Kiss, M., & Holmes, A. (2008). Links between rapid ERP responses to
fearful faces and conscious awareness. Journal of Neuropsychology, 2, 165-181.
Eysenck, M., Mogg, K., May, J., Richards, A., & Mathews, A. (1991). Interpretation of
ambiguity related to threat in anxiety. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100, 144150.
Grey, S. & Mathews, A. (2000). Effects of training on interpretation of emotional
ambiguity. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53, 1143-1162.
Holmes, A., Vuilleumier, P., & Eimer, M. (2003). The processing of emotional facial
expression is gated by spatial attention: Evidence from event-related brain
potentials. Cognitive Brain Research, 16, 174-184.
Mathews, A. & MacLeod, C. (2002) Induced processing biases have causal effects on
anxiety. Cognition & Emotion, 16, 331-354.
Mathews, A., Richards, A. & Eysenck, M. (1989). Interpretation of homophones related
to threat in anxiety. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 98, 236-240.
Milad, M. R., Wright, C. I., Orr, S.P., Pitman, R.K., Quirk, G.J., & Rauch, S.L. (2007).
Recall of fear extinction in humans acivates the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and
hippocampus in concert. Biological Psychiatry, 62, 446-454.
Richards, A. (2004). The resolution of ambiguity and anxiety. In J. Yiend (ed).
Cognition, Emotion and Psychopathology, Cambridge University Press
Richards, A. & French, C.C. (1992). An anxiety-related bias in semantic activation when
processing threat/neutral homographs. Quarterly Journal of Experimental
Psychology, 45, 503-525.
Richards, A., French, C.C., Calder, A. J., Webb, B., Fox, R., & Young, A. W. (2002).
Anxiety-related bias in the classification of emotionally ambiguous facial
expressions. Emotion, 2(3), 273-287.
Vuilleumier, P. (2002). Facial expressions and selective attention. Current Opinion in
Psychiatry, 15, 291-300.
Vuilleumier, P. (2005). How brains beware: neural mechanisms of emotional attention.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 585-594.
Whalen, P.J. (1998). Fear, vigilance, and ambiguity: Initial neuroimaging studies of the
human amygdala. Curent Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 177-188.