distorted worlds week 2

How is emotion defined, and how does it differ from mood?

Emotion is a response to stimuli or mental representations involving subjective, physiological and behavioural components; moods are generally more diffuse, longer-lasting and less clearly triggered.

What are valence and arousal?

Valence is how positive or negative an affective state is; arousal is its level of activation or intensity.

How do James–Lange and Cannon–Bard theories differ?

James–Lange: perception of bodily changes produces emotion. Cannon–Bard: emotional experience and bodily responses occur in parallel.

What do appraisal theories propose about emotion?

Emotion arises from how an event and our responses are cognitively evaluated in context, rather than from bodily responses alone.

What is Ekman’s basic emotion theory?

Six biologically based, broadly universal emotions—happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, anger and fear—have recognisable facial expressions.

What evidence originally supported universal basic emotions?

Darwin proposed evolved emotional expressions; Ekman reported recognition of similar expressions across cultures, including relatively isolated groups.

What are key criticisms of universal facial-expression claims?

Posed and demographically narrow stimuli; expressions are neither perfectly reliable nor specific to one emotion; cross-cultural generalisability and validity are disputed.

What does Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion propose?

The brain constructs emotion categories from core affect, interoception, context, prior experience and learned concepts, including language and culture.

How do basic and constructed emotion theories compare critically?

Basic-emotion theory explains some cross-cultural regularities but struggles with variation and blended states; constructionism explains flexibility but can be difficult to falsify.

What did Lindquist et al. (2012) find about emotion localisation?

Their neuroimaging meta-analysis found no consistent one-to-one mapping between each basic emotion and a dedicated brain region, supporting distributed processing.

How is emotion studied experimentally?

Facial Action Coding System, self-reports, physiology (e.g. skin conductance/heart rate), lesion studies and fMRI/PET using emotional stimuli.

What emotion-induction methods did Siedlecka and Denson (2018) review?

Images/film, music, autobiographical recall, situational procedures and imagery; effectiveness varies by emotion and method.

Why combine subjective and physiological measures of emotion?

Self-report captures experience but is vulnerable to demand characteristics; physiological measures provide complementary evidence, though neither alone uniquely identifies emotion.

What brain systems are implicated in emotion?

Interacting networks including amygdala, anterior insula, vmPFC, ACC, thalamus and occipitotemporal cortex—not a simple one-region-per-emotion system.

What did patient S.M. reveal about the amygdala and fear?

With bilateral amygdala damage, S.M. showed unusually little fear toward external threats (Feinstein et al., 2011), suggesting a role in external threat processing.

How did Feinstein et al. (2013) qualify S.M.’s fear findings?

S.M. could experience panic following internally induced CO2-related sensations, showing that the amygdala is not necessary for every form of fear.

What did Adolphs et al. (1994) find after amygdala damage?

Patients showed a particular impairment in recognising fear from faces, linking the amygdala to threat-relevant facial information.

What are LeDoux’s low and high roads to threat processing?

The low road is a proposed rapid thalamus–amygdala pathway supporting automatic threat responses. The high road involves slower cortical processing that allows more detailed evaluation of stimuli

What did Erk et al. (2007) show about emotion and working memory?

Negative emotional context impaired working-memory performance and modulated amygdala and dorsolateral PFC activity, showing emotion–cognition interaction.

What did Vuilleumier and Schwartz (2001) suggest about emotional attention?

Emotionally salient stimuli could influence processing even in patients with neglect/extinction who failed to consciously report them.

What is Easterbrook’s (1959) cue-utilisation hypothesis?

As arousal rises, attentional scope narrows toward central or salient cues, potentially improving central processing while impairing peripheral detail.

How does positive affect influence attentional scope?

Fredrickson and Branigan (2005) found broadening of attention; later work suggests low versus high motivational intensity matters, so positive affect does not always broaden attention.

What role does motivational intensity play in attention?

Low approach-motivated positive affect tends to broaden attention; high approach motivation can narrow it toward a desired goal (Gable and Harmon-Jones, 2010).

What did Cahill et al. (1996) find about emotional memory?

Amygdala activity while encoding emotionally arousing material predicted later recall, supporting a role for arousal in memory consolidation.

How can emotion retroactively strengthen earlier memories?

Dunsmoor et al. (2015) found later fear conditioning enhanced memory for earlier neutral items from a related category, particularly after a 24-hour delay.

Why does emotional arousal not simply improve all memory?

Arousal can enhance consolidation and central details while narrowing attention and reducing encoding of peripheral information.

What is mood-congruent memory?

Information matching the current mood is more readily recalled—for example, negative mood can bias recall toward negative material.

What is mood-state-dependent memory, and when is it strongest?

Recall improves when mood at retrieval matches mood at encoding; Kenealy (1997) found this more clearly for free recall than cued recall.

How does encoding specificity explain mood-state dependence?

Retrieval benefits when contextual cues overlap with encoding; mood can act as a cue, but explicit retrieval cues may reduce its influence.

What are flashbulb memories?

Vivid, confident recollections of learning about surprising and emotionally important public events (Brown and Kulik, 1977).

What did Sharot et al. (2007) show about 9/11 flashbulb memories?

Amygdala activity related to subjective vividness of recall, particularly among people physically nearer the event; vividness is not proof of accuracy.

Why can highly confident emotional memories still be inaccurate?

Remembering is reconstructive: repeated retrieval can update or distort details, and subjective vividness/confidence do not guarantee accuracy.

How can fear-related attentional narrowing be adaptive?

Prioritising threat cues may aid rapid protective responses even if it reduces memory for peripheral details; Nesse’s smoke-detector principle favours tolerating false alarms.

What are epistemic emotions and what do they do?

Curiosity, surprise and confusion signal knowledge gaps and motivate exploration and learning (Vogl et al., 2019).

What is the eureka heuristic?

A feeling of insight is used as a cue that an idea is correct; Laukkonen and colleagues showed induced “aha” feelings can increase belief in false statements.

What is the weapon-focus effect?

Attention is drawn toward a weapon during an event, often reducing memory for the perpetrator or peripheral details (Johnson and Scott, 1976).

What is the Yerkes–Dodson relationship?

An often-proposed inverted-U relationship: performance may be worse at very low or very high arousal than at moderate arousal, depending on task conditions.

What did Deffenbacher et al. (2004) conclude about eyewitness stress?

Across studies, high stress was associated with poorer eyewitness identification and recall accuracy, challenging simplistic claims that arousal always helps.

What are limitations of laboratory eyewitness studies?

Staged events may differ from real crimes in personal stakes and distress; delays, procedures and witness differences vary across real cases.

What is the central conclusion about emotion and cognition?

Emotion interacts with perception, attention, working memory and memory consolidation; it can help process salient information while distorting what is noticed and recalled.

what is the difference between prospective and retrospective emotional memory enhancement?

prospective enhancement strengthens memories formed after an emotional event whereas retrospective enhancement strengthens related memories formed before later emotional learning