Emotions

What are emotions?

State associated with stimulus that can be rewarding or punishing

Emotion breakdown

• Multifaceted

• Functional

• Social

Multifaceted

• Involves Hedonic values or subjective liking

• contains feeling states and internal bodily responses

• elicits external motor outcomes (expressions)

• Triggers cognitive and action responses

  • ex. curiosity increasing attention

Functional

• Emotions from stimuli linked to survival can be learned through conditioning

• Emotional stimuli receives more attention, memory retention, and action preperation

Social

• Living cooperatively in a group increases survival

• Emotions act as social glue, social learning better than individual

Darwin

Facial and bodily expressions are innate and evolutionary

Freud

Unconcious emotions can be a source of motivation

James-Lange Theory

Emotional experiences are self-perceptions of bodily changes

ex. see a snake, hands shake, we realize we are fearing

body response lead to emotion

Cannon Bard Theory

Emotions happen within the brain and then the bodily response happen after the emotion

ex. see snake, feel fear, hands shake

emotion then body response, counters james lange

Papez and Maclean

proposed a circuit for emotions and maclean polished this idea but we now know the different regions of these emotions like the amygdala

Ekmans 6 basic emotions

Happy

Sad

Anger

Fear

Surprise

Disgust

all others are combinations or shades or social/moral blends

Ortony

Emotions are Appraisal of your reaction to a stimulus

basically your interpretation of an event

Russell and Feldman Barrett

Emotions are categorized in two dimensions

Pleasant or not

Arousal or low arousal

Amygdala and fear conditioning

Fear learning and emotional intensity

• Amygdala damage impairs learned fear but doesnt erase all of it

• Auditory tone (conditioned stimulus) + fear evoking stimulus (unconditioned) = after repeated pairing the tone alone will elicit a fear response

• Amygdala recognizes fear within faces and voices but not other emotions

• Reward system

FEAR HUB but not only place

Mice studies of Amygdala

• unable to pair shock and sound together

• lesions to that part dont remove the fear meaning its innate

• Humans however, with lesions, can understand that shock will happen after the sound but wont display that response

Insula (Insular Cortex)

Between temporal and frontal lobe, deep within lateral sulcus

• Involved in disgust, bodily perception, pain perception, and taste perception. Key recognition of disgust

• Lesions to the Insula results in anability to recognize disgust in face and voices but not other emotions

Motivation

States where rewards are saught and punishments are avoided

Maslow’s Hierarchy

Framework or motivation based on social and psychological needs

• self-actualization

  • to be the best possibly could

• esteem

• love and belonging

• safety needs

• physiological needs

Primary reinforcers

does not need to be learned, food, naturally rewarding

Secondary reinforcers

does need to be learned, money, learned rewarding

Emotional cues

learning from others socially if stimulus is rewarding or punishable

Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC)

involves behavioral flexibility

• Computes/predicts whether a stimulus is rewarding

  • ex. chocolate study

• Lesions to this leads to loss of flexibility and impulsive behavior

• As stimulus becomes less rewarding, activity in the orbitofrontal cortex moves from medial to lateral

value of stimulus

Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC)

Dorsal part of ACC computes CURRENTLY if something is rewarding

lesions lead to lazy behavior

value of action

Ventral Striatum

• Part of basal glanglia

• acts as reward center

• involves reward prediction