chapter 10: emotion

affect

A general term to describe a range of experiences, including a discrete emotion that has a relatively short duration and more diffuse, longer-lasting states such as stress or mood.

amygdala

A brain region anterior to the hippocampus in the medial temporal lobe that is involved in emotional processing.

attentional blink

A phenomenon often observed during rapid serial presentations of visual stimuli, in which a second salient target that is presented about 150 and 450 ms after the first one often goes undetected.

basic emotion

An emotion with unique characteristics, carved by evolution, and reflected through facial expressions.

complex or blended emotion

A combination of basic or learned emotions. Some complex emotions may be unique to social situations.

dimensional theories of emotion

Theories that characterize emotions as differing along one or more dimensions, such as valence (pleasant to unpleasant, positive to negative) and arousal (very intense to very mild).

emotion A discrete affective response to an external or internal event that is typically composed of a physiological response, a behavioral response, and a feeling.

emotion generation

An unagreed-on set of processes that may or may not combine an automatic bottom-up response with a top-down response, which involves memory and/or linguistic representations.

emotion regulation

Voluntary and involuntary processes deployed to manage and respond to emotions.

extinction

The disappearance of a conditioned response when it is no longer rewarded.

facial expression

The nonverbal communication of emotion by the manipulation of particular groups of facial muscles

fear or threat conditioning

A form of classical conditioning in which a neutral stimulus acquires aversive properties by virtue of being paired with an aversive event.

feeling

Either the sensation of touch or the conscious, subjective sensation of an emotion.

insula

Also insular cortex. A part of the cortex hidden in the Sylvian fissure, also has extensive reciprocal connections with areas associated with emotion, such as the amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate gyrus, as well as with frontal, parietal, and temporal cortical areas involved with attention, memory, and cognition

interoception

The perception of physical sensations arising from inside the body, such as arousal, pain, temperature, hunger, and so on.

mood

A long-lasting diffuse affective state that is characterized primarily by a predominance of enduring subjective feelings without an identifiable object or trigger.

reappraisal

A cognitive strategy to reassess or reinterpret a stimulus that elicits an emotion.

stress

A fixed pattern of physiological and neurohormonal changes that occurs in reaction to threat.