Emotion and Cognition

Emotions are reactions to events that are brief in time. What is the link between cognition and emotion? Can you experience emotion without cognition?

Eckman & Friesen (1971): there are 6 basic emotions - anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Emotional expressions are universal. They are considered innate as infants show emotional responses.

The circumplex model (James Russell, 1980) defines emotions in terms of a 2 dimensional circular space, containing arousal and valence.

Arousal: Represents the vertical axis. Bodily changes that occur in emotion - i.e heart rate, sweating, release of stress hormones like cortisol

Valence: Represents the horizontal axis. Subjective quality of emotion (positive or negative)

In this model, emotional states can be represented at any level of valence and arousal, or at a neutral level of one or both of these factors.

Neuroimaging shows the amygdala coes arousal, and other areas code valence (Andreson et al, 2003).

Cognitive psychology was inspired by the computer analogy, which leaves very little scope for emotions.

Understanding how certain stimuli become associated with an emotion is central to understanding interactions between emotions and cognition. The case of Little Albert shows how emotions can be used in classical conditioning. A neutral stimulus (mouse) was paired with a negative stimulus (loud bang) which resulted in fear of the neutral stimulus.

Learning can be expressed through bodily responses, such as arousal (e.g fear). Fear conditioning - neutral stimulus is paired with a fearful stimulus, like associating a car accident with fear of driving.

Conditioning is expressed through preferences: how are these preferences learned? Advertising works because positive affect (e.g celebrity admiration, humour) is paired with the neutral stimulus (i.e the product).

Emotional learning occurs as actions are paired with reward or punishment

Repeated exposure to a stimulus can make you like it (Zajonc, 1980). Exposure leads to processing fluency - increase in liking. Mere exposure effect is the psychological phenomenon by which people develop a preference for things simpply due to familiarity. It can apply to people as well as things. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often a person is seen by someone, the more pleasing and likeable that person appears to be.

Zajonc (1980) showed that even when repeatedly presented stimuli were shown at a level where they did not register conscious awareness in participants, they still showed affective bias towards the repeatedly exposed stimuli.

Zajonc also showed the effect in chickens. Tones of 2 different frequencies were played to different groups of chicks while they were still unhatched. Once hatched, each tone was played to both groups of chicks. Each set consistently chose the tone prenatally played to it.

Memories for embarrassing events do not fade, emotional arousal enhances memory (Christianson, 1992). The amgydala plays an important role in mediating arousal enhanced memory. Kleinsmith & Kaplan (1963) showed that after a 24 hour delay, there was better memory recall for arousing than neutral associations - arousal facilitates consolidation.

However, prolonged arousal and stress can impair memory performance. Stress influences hormonal changes - changes in hippocampal activity which can lead to a reduction in memory. Bremner (2002) found that patients suffering from PTSD have impaired memory and hippocampal atrophy.

Flashbulb memory: people's ability to accurately recall surprising and consequential events (Brown & Kulik, 1977). Schmolck et al (2000) found that people who showed high emotional involvement in the event had more accurate recall.

Emotions can affect attention and perception in different ways. Emotive content captures our attention. Emotional stroop: people respond slower to emotive words (i.e cancer, ****, murder) than neutral words - Pratto & John (1991). These words hold our attention for longer.

Affective primacy hypothesis (Zajonc, 1980): affective reactions like liking can be elicited with minimal stimulus input. Emotion leads to faster more transient modulation of perceptual processes, which result from connections between amygdala and sensory cortical processing area. The amygdala receives input about emotional significance of a stimulus early in the processing and provides rapid feedback to sensory cortical areas, enhancing perceptual and attentional processes.