Lecture 7: Emotion

Emotion

brief state that has a clear trigger, psychological (subjective feeling → valence, motivation)

Emotions ARE NOT

• moods → persistent states where trigger is unclear, prevailing, long-lasting experience, no clear triggers

• reflexes → ultra-brief, not scalable, clear behavioural correlates (ex. Anger → does not always lead to yell)

• motivations → emotions can facilitate drives but are not necessary (ex. Hunger is not an emotion)

• entirely separate from and directly opposed to decision-making → overlap + interact

Emotion + Decision-Making

incidental emotion and integral emotion

Incidental Emotion

current emotional state influences decisions

• ex. disgust lowers sell/buy, sadness lowers selling and increases buying

Endowment Effect

anything you own/made is worth more than you think it is

Integral Emotion

decision is influenced by predicted emotional states

• Loss Aversion → associated with amygdala (vmPFC, ventral striatum, insula), tendency to avoid situations where we lose → avoid predicted negative states

Effective Forecasting

the effective response to a future event, impact bias, ex. Overestimate negative effects → predict an effective change more extreme than that which occurs

False Dichotomy

no clear separation of emotion + reason, exaggerated separated in real-life but they interact

Why We Have Emotion?s

• adaptive (fear + survival response)
• facilitate decision-making when time is short, lack of info, ambiguous options (ex. OFC injury → lack action priority), lesion studies → people lacking emotions have trouble making effective decisions
• emotional regulation → mental health + job performance
• granularity of emotion description → the detail someone uses to describe emotions related to well-being

How Many Emotions?

1) Discrete View → implies set number of emotions exist, but there is a large # of emotional categories
2) emotions are evolutionary selected + involve identifiable circuits → not guaranteed, no rigid structure

Ekman’s Theory

six discrete emotions (anger, disgust, happy, surprised, fear, sad) but actors (not authentic)

• our expressions of emotions are usually subtle and context-dependent, Plutchik’s Model → 8 emotions

Constructionist New View

1) emotions are not discrete, but are part of categories that vary (ex. hybrid emotional states - happy + sad)
2) emotions are shaped by prior experiences and culture (ex. Achievements - wow, great vs. could be better)
3) distributed brain networks + physiological signals (ex. No “fear centre” or no one neural signal)

Emotion Physiology

ANS, changes in organ function (HR, galvanic skin conductance), rapid, involuntary

• ex. Patient SM in fear conditioning and ex. Infant response to lullabies

Amygdala Damage/Patient SM

no physiological response to CS, but response to UCS, aware of CS-UCS association (explicit) but could not acquire a CR to the CS (implicit) → skin conductance

Infant - Lullabies

don’t need to understand language of the lullaby, measure physiological changes

Subjective Bodily Experience

emotional states that reflect to certain parts of the body, actually physiological

Blind Athletes

they experience same expressions to winning/losing as sighted athletes → innate, hardwire

Are Facial Expressions Innate?

• fast, involuntary expressions, associated with basal ganglia

• pancultural (innate) → similar expressions in bound individuals who have no visual experience

• limitations to innate → faces used are inauthentic, language-induced bias (choose specific answer), voices are better representative of internal emotions than faces

• learning → labels are learned and shaped by culture, children are bad at recognizing emotions (they learn)

Eyes + Fear

eye whites → fear recognition through amygdala

• Patient SM could not recognize fear but avoided looking at eyes, when looking at eyes, fear recognize better

• Suggests

Theory of Emotional Processing

James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, Schachter-Singer, Anderson-Adolph, LeDoux

Origin of Fear

event → perception of event → experience a state

James-Lange Theory

event elicits physiological response which is the emotion, sequential, interoception

James-Lange - Limits

1) timing, emotions are earlier than physiological signals
2) many emotions and too few responses → we cannot tell apart emotions from physiological states
3) people are poor at interpreting their physiological states
4) little acknowledgement of the brain

Cannon-Bard Theory

emotion and physiology occur simultaneously, more cortical, hypothalamus active

Bard - Limits

emotions/physiology interact, SC injury → impairs physiology signals, attenuated emotions

Schachter-Singer Theory

emotion is due to interpretation of event + arousal

Anderson-Adolph Theory

emotion elicits responses in parallel, limits → no interactions, independent

LeDoux Theory

perception of events activates two pathways
1) fast, hard-wired behaviours, adapted by evolution
2) slow, initiating emotion, modulated by learning

Summary of Emotional Processing Theories

cognition is key to emotion, associated with cortex,

• events, perception and physiological reactions all influence each other in emotional processing

Studying Emotion

1) State → how we feel, req. eliciting emotion, 2) Attribution (how someone else feels)

Eliciting States

1) eliciting stimulus (ex. Vignettes, spiders, ecological validity), 2) operationalization

1) Emotional States

perception of stimuli and experimenter/setting, conscious experience, categorization

2) Emotional Attributions

1) causal attribution (stimuli) 2) categorization (label) 3) cue (expression)

Animals vs. Humans

animals → invasive, easy to induce, clear correlates, humans → variety, subjective

Distributed Representation

1) diff in -/+ valence state, not clear brain activity, 2) right hemi for - states

Barriers/Limit in Distributed Representation

• circuit models assume certain delineation of regions (ex. CeL for central amygdaloid nucleus)
• though models treat regions as single units, they are a mix of many cells with different influences (ex. CeL cells promote and inhibit defensive behaviour)
• maybe circuity in humans is delicately hard-wired but we can’t observe because don’t have the tools to

Neuroimaging Implications

human → large regions light up, encompass many sub-regions + cell types, animals → individual neurons can be observed and manipulated

Amygdala

input → basolateral and lateral amygdala nuclei, output → central nucleus → hypothalamus, SNS

Amygdala Damage

• Patient SM, can’t experience or recognize fear, could still experience some forms of fear → could conceptually understand fear and fear-inducing circumstances → pseudo-suffocation
• can still get emotion and physiological changes without the amygdala by targeting downstream targets

Fear-Like States

seen in humans/animals, innate or learned, various cues, conspecifics or predators

Threat Imminence in Animals

responses to different types of threats results in different behaviours → various reactions seen in mice with respect to the eminence of the threat + diff cues → diff responses

Neural Mechanisms

detection → integration unit → output, depending on the cue → we have a distinct circuit even those the response might be similar

Neural Circuit for Olfactory

olfactory cue → amygdala → hypothalamus → periaqueductal gray (PAG),

• the innate fear response and the conditioned fear response are different and have different pathways

Neural Circuit for Visual/Auditory Cues

diff motor outputs are attached to distinct circuits, fear might feel the same but is different at the brian level due to the cue, learned/innate, and threats

Fear-Like States - Humans

don’t have predators but have fears + defensive behaviour, many learned fears

• learning to be afraid of something attaches to the present circuit that represents the expression of fear

Learned Fear

defensive responses to other cues + other regions (hippocampus for contextual fear conditioning), pairing context to aversive event so that context signals aversive event →rapid and resists decay

Patient SM

aware of CS-UCS association (explicit - HPC), could not acquire CR to CS (implicit - amygdala),

• Argument

Interoception

ability to perceive and understand internally bodily signals, vmPFC/OFC/ACC/HPA/SS/insula,

• mediation → affect neural networks for interoception + improve mental health, high interoceptive accuracy → high emotion verbalization → high well-being

• neural networks for bodily signals overlap with evaluating emotion (ex. vmPFC and insula)

Aging

Positivity Bias → increase in positive emotions, decrease in negative emotions → cognitive control,

• now → thing that changes in the NS contribute (locus coeruleus), emotional states diff at physiological level

Disorders

with anxiety → exaggerated threat response + impaired extinction, associated with changes in the brain for anxiety, fear, and threat,

• models emphasize abnormal PFC + HPC (poor regulation) and amygdala activity (increased output)

PTSD

strong amygdala (threat learn) and ACC (threat express), weak regulation/inhibition (dlPFC/vmPFC)

Emotional Attribution

each of cause attribution (F), cue, and category (TC) AS w/ specific brain areas

Flashbulb Memory Theory

memories for arousing experiences are better remembered, but memories of all events become inaccurate over time, but confidence is high → remember central ideas, forget everything else

Arousal-Biased Competition Theory

eye fixations on arousing stimuli, weapon focus, words,

• weapon focus → disproportionately focus on weapon, trouble identifying face, arousal biases collecting info

Tagging Hypothesis

memories of mundane events lost, with some exceptions → if we experience emotional event, non-emotional memories related to event are strengthened,

• ex. Memory for items in preconditioning phase is retroactivity enhanced by similar items in conditioning

• when you pair tools-shock, your memory for other tools not paired with shock will improve

Synaptic Tag and Capture Hypothesis

weak memories are tagged for later stabilization by later events

Emotional Regulation

1) Antecedent-Focused (reappraisal) 2) Response-Focused (suppression)

Suppression

suppressing external signs easier than thoughts, takes effort + cannot be maintained, rebound can be frequent + intense, ironic processing, doesn’t work well with mental health problems

Ironic Processing

ex. Thinking about sleeping impairs your ability to fall asleep

Reappraisal

re-evaluate events → emotion, think about event differently, more effective, role of PFC

PFC in Regulation

connected to amygdala, can inhibit it, PFC damage → dysregulation, PFC sensitive to stress as connectivity is plastic and modified by experience

Modulating Emotion via Reappraisal

increasing negative emotions (left dlPFC + ACC), decreasing negative emotion less lateralized (right LPFC + right lateral OFC)

CBT (Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy)

treat depression and anxiety, via reappraisal

Acceptance + Commitment Therapy

embracing thoughts and feelings without shame, treating anxiety depression and addiction, related to mindfulness-based approaches that advocate for acceptance

Mindfulness

paying attention on purpose, nonjudgmentally,

• inhibits elaborative cognitions (rumination + worry), orients individual to openness, curiosity, acceptance,

• mindfulness meditation → supports for anxiety, pain, and depression

Network Changes With Meditation

associated with changes in brain structure/activity, designs not good

• higher activity in PFC and HPC, larger hippocampus

• lower activity in the amygdala, smaller amygdala