Cognition and Emotion

Introduction

  • Cognitive psychology uses computer analogy, which is hard to apply to emotion.
  • Cognitive psychologists often ignore emotion.
  • There's increasing interest in cognition and emotion.
  • Topics include:
    • Cognitive appraisal of emotional experience.
    • Emotion regulation.
    • Effects of emotion on cognition.
    • Cognitive biases in anxiety and depression.

Structure of Emotions

  • Two main approaches:
    • Categorical: Distinct emotions (happiness, anger, fear, etc.).
    • Dimensional: Emotions on dimensions (misery–pleasure, arousal–sleep, positive/negative affect).
  • Dimensional approach:
    • Watson and Tellegen (1985): Two dimensions of positive and negative affect.
    • Mauss and Robinson (2009): Neuroimaging shows similar activation patterns for different emotions; positive emotions are associated with relatively more left-hemisphere activation, whereas negative emotions are associated with relatively more right-hemisphere activation.

Appraisal Theories

  • Cognitive processes determine emotional states.
  • Appraisal theories: Appraisals start the emotion process, initiating physiological, expressive, and behavioral changes.
  • Lazarus's theory includes:
    • Primary appraisal: Situation is positive, stressful, or irrelevant.
    • Secondary appraisal: Resources to cope are considered.
    • Reappraisal: Monitoring and modifying appraisals.
  • Appraisal processes can be automatic or conscious.

Appraisal Components (Smith & Lazarus, 1993)

  • Primary:
    • Motivational relevance: Related to personal commitments?
    • Motivational congruence: Consistent with goals?
  • Secondary:
    • Accountability: Who deserves credit/blame?
    • Problem-focused coping potential: Can the situation be resolved?
    • Emotion-focused coping potential: Can the situation be handled psychologically?
    • Future expectancy: How likely is change?
  • Different emotions are distinguished by appraisal components.

Appraisal Processes (Smith & Kirby, 2001)

  • Associative processing: Rapid, automatic priming of memories.
  • Reasoning: Deliberate, flexible thinking.
  • Appraisal detectors: Continuously monitor information from associative and reasoning processes. The resulting information registered determines emotional state.

Evidence for Appraisal

  • Speisman, Lazarus, Mordkoff, & Davison, 1964: Manipulating soundtrack (denial, intellectualization) during anxiety-evoking films reduced stress.
  • Smith and Lazarus (1993): Scenarios with appraisal manipulations (other-accountability, self-accountability) affected emotional states (anger, guilt).
  • Kuppens, van Mechelen, Smits, and de Boeck (2003): Determinants of anger are flexible; appraisals aren't singly necessary or sufficient.
  • Kuppens and van Mechelen (2007): Trait anger is associated with higher accessibility of anger appraisals (threat to self-esteem; blaming others; and feeling frustrated).
    Chartrand, van Baaren, and Bargh (2006): Automatic appraisal processes can influence people’s emotional state.

Concerns About Scenario Research

  • Little genuine emotion is experienced.
  • Situations and appraisals vary, making it hard to disentangle effects.
  • Research is correlational, not causal.
  • Robinson and Clore (2001): Studies using scenarios may generalize to more emotional situations.
  • Bennett, Lowe, and Honey (2003): Appraisal theory applicable under naturalistic conditions.

Addressing Concerns

  • Siemer, Mauss, and Gross (2007): A single situation produced different appraisals; appraisals predicted emotion intensity.
  • Siemer and Reisenzein (2007):
    • Appraisal and emotion judgements. Appraisal judgements are generally slower than emotion judgements.
    • Proceduralisation hypothesis: Appraisal judgements take longer due to deliberate processing.
  • Berndsen and Manstead (2007): Some appraisals occur after emotion.
  • Roseman and Evdokas (2004): Manipulating appraisal (likelihood of tasting food) affected emotions (joy, relief).

Evaluation of Appraisal Theory

  • Importance: Appraisals influence emotional experience.
  • Clarification: Smith and Kirby (2001) clarified appraisal processes.
  • Limitations:
    • Appraisal of the current situation isn't always crucial.
    • Causality is often in the opposite direction.
    • De-emphasizes the social context.
    • Distinction between automatic and deliberate processes needs clarification.
    • Lazarus failed to justify the list of emotions.

Emotion Regulation

  • Definition: Redirecting the spontaneous flow of emotions.
  • Strategies: Cognitive appraisal, controlled breathing, relaxation, distraction, etc.
  • Gross and Thompson (2007): Process model includes:
    • Situation selection.
    • Situation modification.
    • Attentional deployment.
    • Cognitive change.
    • Response modulation.

Attentional Deployment

  • Distraction reduces negative mood.
  • Van Dillen and Koole (2007): Working memory is key; distraction uses working memory capacity.
  • Van Dillen, Heslenfeld, and Koole (2009): Demanding tasks increase prefrontal cortex activity, decrease amygdala activity, and reduce negative emotion.
  • Rothermund, Voss, and Wentura (2008):
    • Attentional counter-regulation: Minimizing emotional states.
    • Attention allocated to information is opposite in valence to the current affective–motivational state.

Cognitive Reappraisal

  • Focuses on reappraisal, which involves reinterpreting the meaning of a stimulus to change one’s emotional response to it (Ochsner & Gross, 2005).
  • Involves cognitive control in prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate (Ochsner & Gross, 2008).
  • Strategies vary in processes and brain areas involved.

Ochsner and Gross (2008) Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Reappraisal:

  • Reinterpretation: Changing the meaning of the context.
  • Distancing: Taking a detached, third-person perspective.
  • Findings:
    • Prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate consistently activated.
    • Reappraisal reduces amygdala activation.
    • Reduced amygdala activation results from earlier activation in prefrontal cortex.
    • Wager, Davidson, Hughes, Lindquist, and Ochsner (2008): Successful reappraisal associated with high levels of activity in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex combined with reduced amygdala activity, and high activity in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex combined with increased activity in nucleus accumbens.

Expressive Suppression

  • Involves expressive suppression, which is associated with late-occurring prefrontal activation and increased amygdala activation over time (Ohira et al., 2006).
  • Reinterpretation was associated with activation in the dorsal pre- frontal cortex (possibly refl ecting selective atten- tion to contextual stimuli?) and areas associated with language and verbal working memory.
  • Distancing was associated with activa- tion in medial prefrontal cortex (possibly used to evaluate the self-relevance of images).

Evaluation of Neuroimaging Studies

  • Higher cognitive control processes (prefrontal cortex) reduce emotional responses (amygdala).
  • Neuroimaging evidence suggests that emotion regulation is complex and involves more different cognitive processes than previously believed.
    We still need to know whether the cognitive control processes involved in emotion regulation are the same as those involved in performing complex cognitive tasks.

Multi-Level Theories

  • The cognitive system is complex and multifaceted. Several different cognitive processes underlie emotional experience.
  • Multi-level theories account for emotional conflicts.
  • LeDoux (1992, 1996):
    • Sensory information is relayed from the thalamus simultaneously to the amygdala and the cortex.
    • Two different emotion circuits:
    • (1) slow-acting thalamus to cortex to amygdala (detailed analysis of sensory information).
    • (2) Fast-acting thalamus–amygdala circuit (based on simple stimulus features; bypasses the cortex).

Non-Conscious Emotional Processing

  • Processes below the level of conscious awareness can produce emotional reactions.
  • Öhman and Soares (1994): Snake and spider phobics reacted emotionally to phobia-relevant pictures presented very rapidly.
  • Brain activation:
    • Morris, Öhman, and Dolan (1998): Greater activation of the right amygdala to the masked conditioned angry face than the other angry face.
    • Morris, Öhman, and Dolan (1999): Superior colliculus of the midbrain and the right pulvinar of the thalamus were involved, as well as the right amygdala.

Affective Blindsight

  • Patients with damage to primary visual cortex lack conscious visual perception but can respond to visual stimuli.
    --Tested to see whether they show affective blindsight, in which different emotional stimuli can be discriminated in the absence of conscious perception.
  • Pegna, Khateb, Lazeyras, and Seghier (2005):
    • Patient who was entirely cortically blind correctly reported the emotion on 59% of trials.
    • Greater activation in the right amygdala with all of the emotional faces than with neutral faces; with the greatest activation occurring in response to fearful faces.
  • Jolij and Lamme (2005): Normal individuals can show affective blindsight when TMS disrupt visual perception; conscious perception may block access to unconsciously perceived information.

SPAARS Model (Power & Dalgleish, 1997, 2008)

  • Schematic Level:
    • Facts from the propositional level are combined with information about the individual’s current goals to produce an internal model of the situation.
    • Leads to an emotional response if the current goals are thwarted.
    • There are fi ve basic emotions: sadness, happiness, anger, fear, and disgust.
  • Associative Level:
    • Emotions can be generated rapidly and automatically without the activation of relevant schematic models.
    • Short Circuited Emotion.

Preparedness

  • Term preparedness is used to describe the tendency for members of a species to be most likely to develop phobias to certain objects as a result of their evolutionary history.
  • Power and Dalgleish (2008) claimed that there are fi ve basic emotions (sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and happiness) found in essentially all cultures. Power (2006) reported additional support for the notion that there are fi ve basic emotions.
    • According to Power and Dalgleish (2008, p. 153) spelled out in detail what is involved: “The process of emotion generation can become associatively driven so that it appears as if a concurrent process of appraisal is occurring even though it is not and has in fact occurred at some time in the emotional past. In other words, the accessing of the schematic model level of meaning is ‘short-circuited’.”.

Evaluation of SPAARS Model

  • Assumption that there are two major routes to emotion.
  • There are reasonably strong grounds for identifying fi ve basic emo- tions and for claiming that other emotions are based on two or more of these basic ones.
    -There is good evidence for the existence of all the main components of the model.
  • Weakness: The ways in which the various processes involved in emotion interact with each other are unclear. Use of functional neuroimaging could shed additional light on the nature and sequencing of pro- cessing operations in emotion.

Mood and Cognition

  • Any given mood state (nega- tive or positive) seems to infl uence cognitive pro- cessing so that what we think and remember matches (or is congruent with) that mood state.
  • According to Power and Dalgleish, there are only fi ve basic emotions. However, additional emotions represent blends of two or more basic emotions (e.g., a blend of happiness and sadness produces nostalgia).

Bower’s Network Theory (1981)

  • Assumptions:

    • Emotions are units or nodes in a semantic network.
    • Emotional material is stored in the semantic network in the form of propositions or assertions.
    • Thought occurs via the activation of nodes within the semantic network.
    • Nodes can be activated by external or internal stimuli.
    • Activation from an activated node spreads to related nodes.
    • “Consciousness” consists of a network of nodes activated above some threshold value.

  • Consequences:

    • Predicts inter-identity amnesia, in which each identity or personality claims amnesia for events experienced by other identities.
    • There should be less evidence of mood- state-dependent effects such as inter-identity amnesia on tests of implicit memory (not involv- ing conscious recollection)

Evidence Dissociative Identity Disorder Doesn't Support Network Theory

  • Huntjens et al.(p. 787) concluded that patients with dissociative identity disorder “seem to be characterised by the belief of being unable to recall information instead of an actual retrieval inability”.
    Huntjens, Postma, Peters, Woertman, and van der Hart (2003) only analysed the data from dissociative patients with no memory of having learned List A!
  • Bower’s (1994) assumption that dissocia- tive patients should not exhibit mood-state- dependent effects with implicit memory was tested by Huntjens, Postma, Woertman, van der Hart, and Peters (2005). However, the healthy controls simulating dissociative identity disorder showed the same pattern of results, so it is entirely possible the patients were simply simulating inter-identity amnesia.

Evidence for and Explanations of Mood Congruity

  • There is more evidence of mood-congruent retrieval with positive than with negative affect.
  • People in a negative mood are much more likely to be motivated to change their mood.
  • Fiedler, Nickel, Muehlfriedel, and Unkelbach (2001) two possible explainations of most mood congruity efficts.

Thoughts Congruity

  • Forgas and Locke (2005) provided good evidence for thought congruity.
    Participants were made a happy mood or a sad mood. Happy mood produced more optimistic and lenient causal attributions while those in a negative mood were more critical”.
  • McFarland, Buehler, von Ruti, Nguyen, and Alvaro (2007) found important individual differences in thought congruity.
    Participants adopt a ruminative approach or a refl ective approach.

Evaluation of Network Theory

  • Limitation of Bower’s network theory is limited in its applicability, being explicitly designed only to represent the relations among individual words.
  • the theory, “is notoriously diffi cult to faisify. . . . The problem of falsifi ability mainly arises because in practice it is diffi cult to pro- vide a complete a priori specifi cation of the kind of cognitive contents likely to be activated in any particular cognitive task.”
  • The theory is oversimplifi ed.

Affect Infusion Model

  • The starting point for this model is the notion of affective infusion, which occurs when affective information selectively infl uences attention, learning, memory, decision making and judge- ment.
  • Four processing strategies varying: direct access, motivated processing strategy, heuristic processing and substantive processing.

Evidence of Direct Access Used on Judgements

--Salovey and Birnbaum (1989) found that mood did not infl uence estimates of familiar positive healthy events

  • Forgas, Dunn, and Granland (2008) studied the effects of the direct access strategy on helping behaviour under naturalistic conditions.
    n-There was a mood-congruity effect for helping behaviour only among the less experienced sales staff
    -Bower and Forgas (2000) (2007). argued that individuals in a bad mood often engage in motivated processing to improve their mood

Heuristic and Substantive Processing Strategies

--The strategy of heuristic processing involves using our current feelings as information in- fl uencing our attitudes However, when participants’ attention was directed to the probable source of their mood (i.e., the weather) by a previous question , their mood state no longer infl uenced their views about life satisfaction

  • Sedikides (1995) compared the effects of sub- stantive processing and direct access. If the participants were more familiar with what they were making judgements on then assessments where faster.

Evaluation Affect Infusion Model

  • There is reasonable support, there is still often no direct evidence concerning the precise strategy used by individuals. Matters are complicated by Forgas’s (2002) assumption that different processing strategies can be used at the same time.
    -It is also better equipped to explain non-signifi cant effects of affect or mood on performance. Fourth, the affect infusion model basically focuses on the effects of good and bad moods on processing and behaviour.

Anxiety and Depression (Williams et al. 1997)

  • Past losses are associated mainly with depres- sion, whereas future threats are associated mainly with anxiety. Eysenck, Payne, and Santos (2006). There were three versions of each scenario depending on whether it referred to a past event, a future possible event, or a future probable event. There were two versions of each scenario depending on whether it referred to a past event, a future possible event, or a future probable event.
  • Anxiety was associated more with future than with past events, whereas the opposite was the case for depression
    If attentional, interpretive, explicit memory, and implicit memory biases are triggered, then the individual is more likely to have anxiety or depression.

Beck's Schema Theory

  • One of his central ideas is that some individuals have greater vulnerability than others to developing major depression or an anxiety disorder.
  • If that is the case, it is hard to see how their self-schemas or self-concept become positive during the process of recovery.
  • According to Beck and Clark (1988, p. 20).
    • According to Eysenck, MacLeod, and Mathews, schemas infl uence most cognitive processes such as attention, perception, learning, and retrieval of information.

New Theroy Wiiliams al 1997

  • Anxiety and depression fulfi l different functions, and these different functions have important consequences for information processing.
    Anxiety has the function of anticipating danger or future threat.
  • Williams, Watts, Macleod, and Mathews (1997) made use of Roediger’s (1990) distinction between perceptual and conceptual processes.
    There is perceptual, and there is conceptual.
  • The most consistent fi nding (or non-fi nding) is that depressed individuals do not show an attentional bias when the stimuli are presented subliminally
    -Anxious individuals show an attentional bias when perceptual processing is involved but not when conceptual processing is involved, and depressed individuals have the opposite pattern.
    There is very clear evidence of attentional bias with both kinds of stimuli-

Tasks that Study Attentional Bias

  • The dot-probe task. The allocation of attention is assessed by recording speed of detection of a dot that appeared replacing either word. It is assumed that detection latencies are shorter in attended areas
  • Attentional bias has also been studied by using the emotional Stroop task. The participants name the colour in which words are printed - However, there has been much controversy concerning the appropriate interpretation of fi ndings with the emotional Stroop task

Interprretive Bias

There is general agreement that anxious and depressed individuals possess interpretive biases.
So far as anxiety is concerned
In a study on students, Wilson, MacLeod, Mathews, and Rutherford found that extensive training was provided so that one group of participants would focus on the threatening interpretations, whereas the other group would focus on the neutral inter pretations.
After training, both groups were exposed to a video showing near-fatal accidents. The group trained to pro- duce threatening homograph interpretations became more anxious than the other group during the showing of the video.

Murray, Whitehouse, and Alloy (1999)

  • They asked normal individuals high and low in depression to perform a self-referential task (“Describes you?”) on a series of positive and negative words. There was the typical explicit memory bias in depression with free recall but no bias at all with forced recall According to Murray et al. (p. 175), they “implicate an important contribution of diminished motivation and/or conservative report criterion in the manifesta- tion of depression-related biases and defi cits in recall.”
    Williams et al. claimed that no pub- lished studies showed implicit memory bias in depressed individuals.

Treatment for Anxiety and Depression

  • Adrian Wells has developed a form of attention training based on the assumption that we can only fully attend to a single stimulus or thought at any particular moment However, it is concerned mainly with the voluntary control of attention.
  • experimental evidence Suggesting that changing interpretive biases has an impact on anxiety that produces a positive interpretive bias can reduce anxiety just as producing