Emotions module 6 pt.1

• Psychologists define emotion in terms of three components:

  • Cognition
  • Readiness for action
  • Feeling
• JAMES LANGE THEORY OF EMOTION

  Suggests that the autonomic arousal and skeletal action occurs first in an emotion.
• James Lange Theory of Emotion


  What you experience as an emotion is the label you give to your responses
• JAMES-LANGE THEORY LEADS TO TWO PREDICTIONS

  1. People with a weak autonomic or skeletal response should feel less emotion.
  2. Increasing one’s response should enhance an emotion
• damage to the spinal cord


  have no sensations or voluntary movements from the level of the damage downward. They generally report experiencing emotions about the same as before their injury.
• Pure autonomic failure


  Someone with this condition does not react to stressful experiences with changes in heart rate, blood pressure, or sweating.
• people with Pure autonomic failure


  they say they feel their emotions much less intensely than before.
• Botulinum toxin (“BOTOX”)


  blocks transmission at synapses and nerve– muscle junctions. Study found that people with injections that temporarily paralyzed all the facial muscles reported weaker than usual emotional responses
• Walter Cannon


  objected that feedback from the viscera is neither necessary nor sufficient for emotion, that it does not distinguish one emotion from another
• limbic system


  includes the forebrain areas surrounding the thalamus –traditionally been regarded as critical for emotion.
• frontal and temporal lobes


  activated during an emotional experience.
• During aggression, the brain releases serotonin
• Clinical depression is linked to low serotonin.
• High levels of serotonin may inhibit a variety of impulses.
• Output from the amygdala to the hypothalamus

  controls autonomic fear responses
• Axons extending from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex


  regulate approach and avoidance responses.
• The amygdala in the brain’s temporal lobe


  mportant in the experience of emotions for it provides a link between the perception of an emotion producing stimulus and the recall of that stimulus later leading to a conditioned response later on.
• Damage to the amygdala interferes with:

  -the learning of fear responses

  –retention of fear responses previously learned

  –interpreting or understanding stimuli with emotional consequences
• Amygdala damage affects the ability to judge “trustworthiness” in people.
• People with amygdala damage focus on emotional stimuli the same as irrelevant stimuli or details.
• Amygdala damage also affects the ability to recognize emotions specifically in photographs or pictures.
• Effect is particularly strong for fear or disgust.
• Excessive fear and anxiety disorders are associated with hyperactivity in the amygdala