Transcription
Okay, welcome everybody to the second part of this week's cognitive psychology lecture. And in the second part, we will talk about emotion and cognition. And we will start with a little introduction to emotions in general, and then how emotions and cognition interact with each other.
Let's start with an introduction into emotions. A brief definition of emotion could be that emotions are mind-body responses triggered by a stimulus in the environment. So, this contains that the response we have is not only in in our mind, but also that there is a physiological response associated with emotions. And triggered by stimulus in the environment could be an object we have recognized, or something which has been said by another person. Could be many different things. It could also be the internal environment. So, when we feel something like pain or so, and we may feel pain in the heart area, and then we respond with fear because we think we have a heart attack.
And emotions have a couple of unique characteristics which differentiate them from other things in in the cognitive system. One is they are of short duration and usually just take a few seconds if it's really an emotional experience which we uh have. They generate a subjective experience. So, this is by this it's meant this this subjective feeling which we have with an emotion, like it feels sad or so. This is meant by the subjective experience. Further characteristics are that they generate action tendencies. And the idea is that different emotions increase the likelihood of different actions, or of behaving in a different way. So, for instance, if we pers if we experience fear, this might cause flight behavior. While when we experience disgust, this more likely causes avoidance behavior of whatever we see or smell or so. A further characteristic is that they are usually accompanied by recognizable facial expressions. So, it's a very efficient and quick way to communicate our feelings and emotions to others.
When we speak about emotions, it's important to differentiate it from mood, because the two are linked to each other, but they're not the same thing. And the idea is that mood is the baseline of the emotional system. That means what we feel when nothing stimulates the emotional system and we don't have any response to stimulus. And as I already said, there are interaction between emotions and mood. And just for as an example, when you are in a very, very bad mood, that may moderate the impact of positive emotions and may just tone them down very strongly or something like that.
What's the purpose of emotions? One idea is that emotions form kind of an archaic cognitive system, or a very old cognitive system, which is relevant to to guide our actions and behavior. And in in in the present form, it's it's a basic way of information processing, and we only have little control, if at all, over that. So, it's mostly an automatic system. The good thing is that it saves time, and this can be really invaluable in in dangerous situations. So, for instance, if we experience fear, then this results in an increase of adrenaline, which in turn increases the heartbeat, the muscle tones, and everything, and we are really ready for fight or flight. So, it's a very useful thing for our survival, actually. So, we can respond more quickly, more rapidly, and possibly even with more strength, with more focus, and things like that. And in this context, um, the suggestion is that the high-level cognition, which we spoke about so far in this lecture, like thinking, planning, language, working memory, and all this, is an add-on to the emotional system, which came over it later on. Over that. It's not a very simplistic system. We know that that we have emotions as old and and the neocortex is new. There's much more interaction between the system and not that clearly distinguished, but that's a very basic idea. And the two systems are entangled and work together. They work in concert. And usually, we don't notice that that all the time both systems are at work and and guide our behavior. When we know to notice it, that is usually when they return conflicting responses about what to do, what's the best behavior next.
So, suppose you actually go to a high on a hiking trade trip, let's say in Canada, where there are bears running around and it's really dangerous, and you see such a bear. So, you have an emotional response to that, and you may have a cognitive response. The emotional response is probably to run away. But the usual guidance, to my knowledge, is that you should not run away. That you should stand and stay still. And, um, I don't know, you should either try to make noise or crouch down or something like that. I don't live in Canada, so I don't know how to deal with bears. But it's surely not running away. So, we have two conflicting responses here. We have the cognitive response of stand still, and the emotional response of run away. And and they have to negotiate between each other. And our behavior will then be influenced by either of them, or a combination of them, or something like that.
Another example is, you know, in in sports, we see these people going to fight because probably the emotions were so strong. And they know exactly, they may have quite severe consequences of their actions. They may be banned for one, two, three games. They may have to pay a fine and stuff like that. But they know that cognitively. But the cognitive system can't restrict in that example, the emotional response they show.
Okay, when we talk about emotions, then we can see that there are two different facets to that. In a lot of emotional models or concepts of emotion, one is called the emotional response, and that refers to the actual changes that take place in the body and mind, like our physiological response, like an increased heart rate or things like that. And then we have the emotional experience, and this is where we become conscious or aware of these changes, which are caused by the emotional response.
And Phillips proposed a model which suggests the time course of how these things appear and how what the different aspects or angles of the two are of the emotional response and the emotional experience. And this Phillips model is a so-called appraisal model. And it's called like that because there's the assumption that when we get a stimulus in the environment, we see something, we hear something, then an appraisal module evaluates the emotional significance of that stimulus. Is it emotionally relevant? Should an emotional response be triggered or not? And if it decides yes, there's a bear right in front of me, I should elicit an emotional response. This outcome of the appraisal module is forwarded to the effective state module. That's how Phillips calls these modules. Just to give you an example, suppose you see a chair, which for most people is not really emotion-evoking. So, the appraisal module would not forward anything to say, okay, please elicit an emotional response to that. Of course, it can be different if you suddenly rediscover your childhood chair, which you spent hours in, which you absolutely loved. Then it's a different thing. So, it's really dependent on on the specific item, and the appraisal is different between people. There's no objective truth to that.
Okay, so the effective state module now produces the current emotional state, like physiology, the heart rate increases, and all the changes which go with an emotional response. If we don't have an emotion, so the appraisal model doesn't forward anything, then the effective state module is at the baseline level, and that's the mood which we have. The working of this effective state module can be modulated top-down. Can be increased or it can be decreased. So, for instance, if we watch horror movies, then sometimes all the context and the build-up and the music may, you know, increase our processing of certain stimuli. Or in a more conscious sense, if you're a sportsman and your opponent is the stimulus, and you want to show aggressive behavior, and and you may experience hatred or whatever, then this regulation may say, no, no, please calm down. You should not do that. And also the work of the appraisal module itself can be modulated and regulated. I can for instance say, okay, I may be afraid of spiders or something, but I may say, okay, this is a plastic spider. I should not be afraid of that. This should not constitute a stimulus which needs to evoke fear.
Okay, so the effective state module produces this response, and this is on the previous slide what we called the emotional response to that stimulus. Increased heart rate, muscle tone increases, and fear, things like that. Now, what happens is a little bit of a funny idea, or unusual idea, if you hear for the first time. It is like that. Then suddenly our senses feel, wow, my heart rate is increased. I start sweating. I must experience fear. So, that's really the sensory feedback from that emotional response informs our consciousness about our emotional state. It's a little bit like our own mind reads our body, pretty much like an external other person would do that as well, and then says, ah, it must be that emotion because it's that constellation of physiological responses. And this is then or gives rise to the emotional experience. Say, I have this idea, I have fear. And then you are experiencing, you have the emotional experience of fear associated with that. And then based on the emotional experience, you can regulate, possibly. There's a potential. It's not maybe emotion is so strong that you actually don't. But in principle, there's the possibility. Like the example we had with a sports person, anger rising. The experience is, oh, I feel anger. I feel anger coming up, and it's getting stronger. And then trying to regulate that down. And the appraisal module, oh, he, he, my opponent, he's actually a nice guy. He's good-looking, isn't he? And the effective state module, like, like, okay, calm down. Don't be so, so much there.
So, this was a model of how the emotional response and emotional experience come into being. When we approach emotions from another aspect, we know that we have different emotions. We have, for instance, fear, or we may have taunt things like that. And there people made a distinction between so-called basic emotions and onto genetic emotions. And basic emotions are kind of inbuilt emotions. They are innate. We are born with them, and they are cross-culturally universal. The idea is that they are implemented by a specific neural circuit in our brain. This results, for instance, in the fact that facial expressions of these basic emotions are pretty universal across cultures around the world. And however, there's agreement only about some emotions to be to constitute basic emotions. And for some emotions, it's quite clear they're onto genetic. And there are a couple of emotions where some people would say, yeah, that's a basic emotion, and I would say, oh, it's an ontogenetic emotion. And the traditional agreed on basic emotions are fear, with the action tendency to flee, mainly anger to fight, disgust not to touch, avoid. Happiness is usually considered to be approach, you know, getting close to somebody. And we have sadness, surprise. These are the six traditional ones.
The key researcher who started the investigation into the emotions and in particular the facial expression of emotions is Paul Ekman. And his Ekman faces, uh, so the stimulus material he created is quite well known. And here you can see, I hope I get it right now. So, this would be anger, this would be fear, and this would be disgust, and this would be surprise, happiness, and sadness. Now, it's quite interesting, even when you go to very remote cultures which have no contact to western civilizations or any other bigger civilizations, they are rather good at still identifying these emotions from westerners. And if they are asked to do create facial expressions of these emotions, they're quite similar as well. It's never perfect, but it's above chance level. So, there's strong evidence that we have these basic inborn emotions.
Oh, sorry. And here I wanted to bring in a little video clip again from The Big Bang Theory about an emotion detector which has been built. Because, uh, if you don't know the show, the main character here, you see in the arm with the yellow shirt, Sheldon, he has some difficulties understanding the emotions of other people. So, there's a device which might help him and the other person, Amy, doing the cool interpret them. So, in in principle, that is actually possible that computers, uh, detect emotions which we experience with a pretty good accuracy. And the emotion we experience, for instance, also influences our speech patterns. And acoustic analysis can, to some extent, again, by no means perfect, but can make inferences and guesses about what is the emotional state of the participant. So, the video we've just seen is not unrealistic at all.
Okay, let's turn to the ontogenetic emotions, the other big category. And these are the so-called non-basic emotions. And examples are pride or guilt. So, it can be very difficult, sorry, not difficult, different between cultures how people experience guilt and pride. So, in some cultures, it's it's normal and good to be pride of proud of the things you do. And in other cultures, it's it's much less, uh, socially acceptable to to experience this emotion of pride. And and there are different connotations to that. What exactly causes the feeling of pride and guilt and things like that. And they usually emerge during child development. So, basically through learning. And in these non-basic ontogenetic emotions, we can see clear cross-cultural differences in their expression. And this varies. Some emotions are so specific to cultures that if you take distant cultures, they sometimes can't really understand or predict or identify the emotion of the other person. While sometimes these cultural differences just show as that the ability to detect the emotion is is lower than it would be if you would see somebody from your own culture. But in principle, it's still possible.
Okay, so to summarize this introduction. Emotions are mind-body responses which are triggered by stimulus in the environment, which are of short duration, just a couple of seconds, which generate this feeling, this subjective experience, and they generate action tendencies, for instance, uh, fear, flight, disgust, avoidance. And they are accompanied by recognizable facial expressions. Emotions are different to mood, which would be the baseline state in which we are. And it has been suggested that emotions serve as a very basic, archaic cognitive system. And if just a few slides ago, we have seen that some emotions are culturally universal, inborn, basic emotions, and some, the ontogenetic ones, are culture-dependent and learned.
Okay, if you have questions on this emotion part, then just post them on BBL. Now, let's turn to emotion and cognition. How do they interact? Because we said already a couple of times that they are not independent systems. They actually interact with each other very, very closely. And first example we have seen in this in this image here, where we said, okay, the emotional response is what we feel with our cognitive system, and our cognitive system that may induce a regulation of of the emotional state.
Another example for the interaction is, try to remember something very intense. Could be something like your first ever kiss, your wedding day, the birth of a child, or things like that. And if you really close your eyes and go into that for a brief second, then you will see often that when you remember this event, that you may see the scene, you may smell and hear the sounds that have been. And also you may feel the emotions you have felt back then. So, our episodic long-term memory also links to emotions. So, long-term memory is a clear cognitive structure. So, there's a strong link there.
Now, a more experimental demonstration that emotion and cognition interact is the learning of a fear response. So, suppose we have this neural circuit for a fear response, and this can be triggered or activated by seeing a fear-relevant stimulus, like a bear. If we have a neutral sound, it does not activate a fear response. If it's just like a computer beep or something like that. However, if in an experiment, you present the two frequently together, then the sound alone will be able to activate or elicit a fear response. And this is actually closely related to classical conditioning. What is the the key point here is that a neutral sound, which we just cognitively process, can be linked to an emotional response, again, demonstrating the link between emotion and cognition.
A further example is study by Ohman from 2001, how emotions influence cognition. In this case, the perception speed. Participants had the following task, and there were two different conditions. And they always saw arrays containing nine images. And I just put names here. In the study, they were actually images of flowers and of spiders. But because some people are afraid of spiders, I just use the word here. So, and these images could be fear-relevant, like spiders, they also used snakes and things, or fear-irrelevant, like flowers and mushrooms and stuff. Now, in half of the stimuli, so when they would see such a screen, one dissonant image of another category is inserted into the array. And if that wasn't the case, all good, next try would start. But if it's the case, participants had to press a button as quickly as possible, like, okay, there's one which doesn't fit in, that's the task. Now, in this task, or in this condition, of the nine images, eight were non-fear-related, fear-irrelevant, like flowers, and one was fear-related. So, this is the odd one out. And we are fast in detecting such a thing. Suppose the other way around. In the other condition, we have eight fear-inducing stimuli, and the odd one out is a non-fear stimulus, or fear-irrelevant stimulus, like the flower in this example. And in this case, we are slower to respond than here. The argument is that a stimulus which elicits an emotional response, like a fear response, captures our attention. So, we are much more attentive. We it's directly tracked there. If we just think like, let's say, like a non-emotional computer, we could say in both cases, we have one odd stimulus, so that should be as salient as this. Do you remember the lecture on perception, where we had black A among red A's, and then the black was the salient one, which was jump out, or a red A among black A's, where the red was the one which was jumping out? So, it can't be a simple perceptual salience. There must be because this would be the same in both, there must be, um, something with the emotional appraisal of the stimuli.
Okay, this is a slightly different study, but illustrating the same point, how emotions can influence cognition. And this is an example about decision making. And in this case, a study by Bechara. They used patients with damage to the prefrontal lobe. And among many, many other things, the prefrontal cortex also processes emotions and evaluates emotional information. And the task is kind of a gambling task. And the participants were given four different decks of cards and two thousand dollars, of course, not real, just play money. And, um, they had to pick one card at a time. And they could pick which from which pack or from which deck they would do that. And when they would pick a card, and then for that card, they made either win somebody or lose some money from this virtual two thousand, two thousand dollar. And obviously, the goal is to win as much money as possible for a gambling task. Now, these four decks were prepared. And they are prepared in a way that there are good packs, which on average would win money, or bad packs, where on average you would lose money. Of course, it's not totally obvious that you would in one peg lose every time, and then the other one win every time. It's balanced, but you know, in the long run, in sd average. What the authors of that study also did, they measured the galvanic skin response or skin conductance. You know, like in in the lie detector. And the skin conductance is a measure of physiological arousal. And physiological arousal is one key element of our physiological response to emotions. So, if our physiological arousal is high, we get slightly sweaty, so the conductance is lower. And then this can be picked up. And here it's just taken as a measure as of emotional response to what happens.
So, here's again this illustration. You have four packs of cards, and you should take them. And if you do that with normal participants, that means healthy participants, which don't suffer from a prefrontal damage, they learned that and try to avoid the two bad packs which would lose their money over time. And also, you can measure a difference in skin conductance before taking a card in the bad and good decks. So, they show a different emotional response when they pick a card from the bad deck as compared to the good deck. So, there's, we don't know, we need to know the specific, it's just shows that the healthy participants process the emotional value of these packs. However, the patients with the prefrontal cortex damage did not show any differences. So, the interpretation is that these patients have lost the ability to compute the emotional value of an item. And if I can't compute the emotional value, then I'm lost at deciding, is that a bad or a good deck? And I just behave random and may behave sub-optimally.
So far, we have spoken about negative emotions, basically. And that they activate a threat detection system. And this makes perfect sense for our survival. But what about positive emotions? It's not really sensible or logical to say they are a warning for positive threats, because there is nothing like that really. What has been found is that positive emotions can facilitate complex, complex, complex cognitive operations. So, when you think at problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity, these higher-level things, it has been shown that if people are in a good state, in a positive emotional state, that they are somewhat better at these tasks as compared to a more gloomy and negative state. So, um, just to mention, that's how positive emotions may, uh, affect the cognition. I'm not saying that that is the main and sole purpose of positive emotions, so that we are slightly better. It's very likely that they are relevant for social interaction with other people, to shape group structures and interpersonal relationships, and these things. This is only to demonstrate that emotions are closely linked to cognition as well.
Okay, and a final example of how emotion and cognition interact is if you think of cognitive therapy, as devised by Beck in 1975, for instance, to treat depression. And in depression, the assumption is, or the assumption of Beck and people coming from this line of cognitive therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, is that the cognitive processing is distorted in depressed people, in a way that the incoming perceptual information is systematically interpreted in the negative way, which is not warranted. So, when we go back to the theoretical models, you may say the appraisal module is not working correctly. There is a neutral or even positive stimulus, but it assigns a negative emotional response to that. And positive information is just not considered and ignored. And cognitive therapy aims to remove these cognitive distortions. To that. And to do that, patients are asked to monitor all their thought patterns. And when they realize, oh, I just had a negative thought, they are advised that they should test this negative thought for validity. As an example, a person may think, I've never done anything positive by working. Then you should say, is it really true? You never did anything positive? And most likely, people will realize, well, yeah, maybe I'm not the best at my job, or I struggle, but yeah, I had success in that domain. And, um, I'm able to keep a job, so support my living and have an income. And there, if you test these things, you will realize that, uh, these type of thoughts that those people have usually are not true. They don't hold stand to such a test. And, um, the concept of the cognitive therapy is that when we challenge these thoughts and focus instead on the positive side, on the success, and then realize that our beliefs are actually not really true, that then this slowly changes the mechanisms of how the incoming information is interpreted. So, in a more generic way, we can say that in cognitive therapy, cognition and emotion closely interact with each other to treat depression in this example.
Okay, to summarize that part. Emotion and cognition are not independent but interact in a variety of ways, such as that cognition can modulate the emotional response, so that I try to calm down, for instance. Emotions can affect the speed and accuracy of perceptual dissection, you know, with spiders and the flowers. Can affect problem-solving and decision-making, like positive emotions. And we have seen that we can make good use of understanding this link between cognition and emotion for the development of psychotherapy approaches. That's it for the second part. If you have any questions, please post them on the BBL discussion forum. And next week, which will be the last week, we will speak about decision making as one topic, and social cognition as the other topic. Thank you very much for watching, and maybe see you next week. Bye.