Emotion and Social Cognition

This set of flashcards covers key vocabulary and concepts related to emotion, social cognition, and related brain functions. It includes terms related to anger, fear conditioning, brain regions (amygdala, hippocampus, vmPFC, insula), theories of emotion, social behavior (social referencing, joint attention), implicit bias, self-reflection, embodiment, and language processing.

Offensive Anger

Involves a sense of control over the outcome of the conflict and is accompanied by a leftward prefrontal EEG asymmetry.

Defensive Anger

Involves a sense of helplessness over the conflict and tends to avoid the offender; accompanied by a rightward EEG asymmetry.

Vertical Integration Models

Attempt to provide an integrative account of emotional processing across many levels of the nervous system.

Conditioned Fear

Requires the integrity of the amygdala and is elicited not only by the presence of the CS itself (cued fear) but also by features of the environment.

Amygdala

Key station in conditioned fear learning, integrating information from subcortical and cortical processing pathways.

Hippocampus

Important in contextual fear acquisition and the context-dependent recovery of fear after extinction training.

Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (vmPFC)

Suppresses fear responses when they are no longer adaptive (i.e., during extinction training) via inhibitory connections within specific subnuclei of the amygdala.

Emotional Perseveration

The persistence of fear responses to stimuli that are no longer real threats.

Fear Extinction

Depends on the integrity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).

Somatic Marker Hypothesis

Theory about the role of emotion in decision making; attempts to explain how the brain and body signal affective information that is used to guide everyday decision making.

Insula

A key brain region for monitoring the physiological state of the organism (interoception) and for storing visceral and skeletomotor representations of emotional states that are reinstated during decision making.

Dimensional Theories

Suggest that emotional categories emerge from points in a two-dimensional space formed by crossing axes of arousal and valence.

Social Referencing

The use of body gestures and facial and vocal expressions of others to determine how to deal with an ambiguous or novel situation; critical for learning how to appropriately behave in particular situations.

Joint Attention

The allocation of processing resources toward an object cued by another individual.

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

Measure of implicit racial attitudes.

Self-Reflection

Requires an initial redirection of attentional focus from external sensory events to internal thoughts, memories, feelings, and visceral sensations.

Embodiment

Refers to the sense of being localized within one’s own body.

Extrastriate Body Area

A region of extrastriate visual cortex, is engaged when individuals visually process human bodies or body parts, imagine changes in the position of a body part, or adopt a third-person perspective for visualizing their own body.

Temporoparietal Junction

A multisensory area at the border between the temporal and parietal lobes and surrounding the posterior aspect of the Sylvian fissure.

Social Perception Deficits

An inability to extract social cues, especially in facial communication.

Power Motivation

An enduring preference for having an impact on other people or the world at large; tend to engage in more risky behaviors, attain higher positions in corporate management, and be more sexually active.