Emotion & Language (Slide 19)

Amygdala role in Emotion and Memory

Amygdala modulates hippocampal consolidation

Five Effects of Emotion on Memory

1. Memory advantage for emotional stimuli increases over time

2. Emotion impacts recollection, rather than familiarity

3. Emotion impacts the recollection of items rather than contexts

4. The emotion effect on episodic memory is dependent on the amygdala

5. The emotion effect on episodic memory is not depended on the hippocamus

Amygdala and Stress

Amygdala connects to hypothalamus through the fornix

Leads to release of cortisol

The hippocampus is highly sensitive to glucocorticoids

Negative feedback loop eventually shots off HPA activity

Short Term Stress

reliably increased cortisol

• No association between cortisol and memory

Stross prior to encoding decreased memory

• Improved if delay was short, material related to stressor

Post encoding stress improved memory

Chronic Stress

Supression of Long-term potentiation

Telomere shortening

Reduced hippocampal volumes

Decrease in dendritic spines

Orbitofrontal Cortex

Cells fire in expectation and response to reward

Amount of firing is relative, not absolute

Somatic Marker Hypothesis

emotions influence decisions (body > emotions)

Frontal Cortex and Drug Addiction

Dorsal frontal regions involved in cognitive control

Ventral frontal regions driving more automatic, emotion-related processes

Shift in balance in individuals with addiction to emotional processing

Amygdala and Social Processing

Amygdala activity increases when viewing faces

Responds to all emotions; greatest reaction is for fear

Lesions impair processing of fearful faces

• can sometimes still express fear

Social Anxiety (role and study)

Harsh (angry, disgusted, fearful) faces elicited greater activity in patients

degree of amygdala activation correlated with severity of social anxiety symptoms

Amygdala and Social Judgements

Amygdala has preference for a person’s in-group when assessing emotional expressions and making social judgments.

Disgust and the Insula

Activation of insula to “disgust” but not fear

Building Blocks of Language

Phenome - small unit of sound that matters

• e.g. bat vs. cat

Morpheme - smallest uunitmodifying meaning

• e.g. fast vs. faster

Language is a mental lexicon

Organized by semantic relationships