Emotions & Cognition
Design Characteristics of a GoalSeeking 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.
EMOTIONS
Positive
Love
Negative
Joy
Anger
Sadness
Bliss
Contentment
Annoyance
Contempt
Agony
Grief
Fear
Fondness
Infatuation
Horror
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
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.
Williams,1992;1986; Williams & Broadbent, 1986; Mineka & Nugent, 1995; Teasdale &
Fogarty, 1979
Mood disorders and Memory
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
MacLeod & Mathews, 1991; Mineka & Nugent, 1995; McNally, Foa, & Donnell, 1989;
Becker, Rinck, & Margraf, 1994; Williams, Watts, MacLoed, and Mathews (1988)
Mood Congruence
--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.
Bower,1992; Bower, 1983; Forgas & Bower, 1987
Mood Congruence
Bower’s Semantic Associative Network model
Getting
Walking dog
Puppies
Bower,1981
Sunburn
Happiness
Sunshine
Mood Dependent Retrieval
--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.
= PEACE
Why?
Bower, 1992
= PEACE
=?????
Mood Dependent Retrieval
--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
Eich, 1980; 1990; Eich & Metcalfe, 1989
How are moods generated?
Velten Approach:
I feel like I’m on pins
and needles today
I’m so worried, I can’t
concentrate on anything
Eich’s Continuous Music Technique:
Happy
Sad
Movies (Gross)
Gross’ films
Velten, 1968; Sinclair, 1997; Eich, 1995
If you would like samples
of these songs for your
presentation, please
contact Katherine AumerRyan:
aumerryan@mail.utexas.e
du and she can help you
out.
Why does this matter?
Questions:
“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.”
Eye-witness testimony
Jones,1999; Loftus
Memories for Trauma
The 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 Amygdala
a 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?