emotions

• There are two possible interactions between emotion and cognition: Effects of cognitions on emotions, and effects of emotions on cognitions. 
• An interesting method to study emotions is experience sampling. 
• The structure of emotions has been addressed by dimensional and categorical approaches. In the former approach emotions are defined by valence and arousal; in the latter a distinction is made between 6 basic emotions - happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, surprise. 
• Emotions consist of several components. Five of them are: appraisal, autonomic response, action tendency, expression, and feeling. 
• Emotions are shorter and more intense than moods; they are elicited by stimuli the person is aware of. Moods last longer, are less intense, and are not tied to a specific stimulus. Differences in personality mean that some people experience some emotions more often and more intensely than others. 
• Affect is sometimes used as a catch-all phrase. Positive and negative affect are to some extent each other’s opposite, because they correlate negatively, but they do not completely exclude each other, giving rise to mixed feelings. 
• Emotional experiences depend on an interacting network of

  bottom-up and top-down processes.
• Stimulus appraisal

  • Stimulus appraisal is a process that detects and assesses the

  significance of the environment for an organism’s well-being. It

  involves both controlled processes (deliberate reasoning) and

  automatic processes (activation of memories). The latter require

  no awareness, but may not be completely unconscious.

  • Hypervigilance is an example of top-down influences. Constant

  attention is given to stimuli associated with a certain emotion. The

  environment is continuously scanned in search of such stimuli.
• Physiological processes

  • Emotion-generating stimuli cause an increase in arousal in the

  body, due to activation of the sympathetic nervous system. The

  arousal increases the intensity of the emotion, but does not seem

  to be necessary to experience emotions.

  • Facial expressions communicate emotions. They also help to

  generate and understand emotions, but do not seem to be critical

  for these skills.

  • There are few indications that the arousal is emotion-specific. The

  same is true for the pattern of brain activation.

  • The amygdala is an important structure for the experience of

  emotions.
• Understanding emotions

  • Conscious feelings require interpretation of the automatic processes

  involved in emotion generation.

  • Some people are better at understanding feelings than others

  (empathy vs. alexithymia).
• Emotion regulation

  When a person overrides their initial, spontaneous emotional response. This can happen explicitly or implicitly.
• Forms of emotion regulation

  • Changing the situation (situation selection, situation modification)
  • Attentional regulation (distraction, selective attention, reappraisal)
  • Modulating the response (suppression, acceptance)
• There are indications that different strategies may be needed for different emotions, in different situations, and for different types of people. There is no "one fits all" recommendation to be made.
• Examples of negative emotion coping strategies

  • Rumination
  • Worrying
  • Self-blame
  • Catastrophising
  • Excessive expression
• how does emotions affect cognition?

  • Our emotional state affects numerous aspects of cognition.

  • Mood states can be manipulated by asking participants to focus on

  emotional personal events or by presenting emotional music or

  movie clips.
• Attention

  • Easterbrook (1959) proposed a useful hypothesis about the effects

  of negative affect: An increase in negative affect first improves

  attention but after an optimal level impairs it, giving rise to an

  inverted-U curve. There is discussion about whether the same

  relationship is true for positive affect.

  • Neutral stimuli can be made positive or negative by means of

  conditioning; afterwards they automatically capture attention and

  interfere with task performance.
• • Attention bias refers to the allocation of attention to mood-related

  stimuli over other stimuli. Researchers hope to relate individual

  differences in attention bias to other aspects of (cognitive) functioning,

  but this turns out to be a difficult quest due to the low testretest

  reliability of the attention bias variables (based on the

  emotional Stroop task and the dot-probe task).
• Interpretation bias

  • Emotions not only influence attention; they also influence the

  interpretation of ambiguous information. Emotional bias is observed

  in several forms of emotion disorders (general anxiety, social phobia),

  but also in happy people, who have been claimed to be more gullible.

  Reliance on emotion in general seems to increase people’s belief in

  fake news.
• Memory

  • Emotionally toned information is learned and retrieved best when

  its affective value is congruent with the learner’s or rememberer’s

  current mood state. This is called mood congruity.

  • Bower (1981) proposed the emotion network model to explain mood

  congruity effects. According to the model, memories are stored in a spreading activation network. Emotions are part of the network

  and, therefore, are able to influence the activation levels of memories associated with them.
• memory

  • The amygdala plays an important role in enhanced memory for

  emotional information relative to neutral information, as observed

  in patients with Urbach-Wiethe disease.
• Judgement and decision making

  • Mood states have significant effects on judgement and decision

  making.

  • Decisions often evoke integral emotions as a consequence of the

  decision to be made. However, decisions can also be influenced by

  incidental emotions due to past events.
• Anxiety is associated with pessimistic judgements about the future

  (against the optimism bias). Anxiety is further associated with

  impaired decision making and avoidance of risk.
• Sadness is also associated with pessimistic judgements about the

  future. In general it leads to risk aversion, but in a less uniform way

  than anxiety. In particular related to health, sad people seem to take

  more risks. They also seem to have a higher need for immediate

  reward.
• Anger is associated with optimistic judgements about the future

  and can lead to impaired decision making based on shallow

  processing, particularly when it increases the feeling of confidence.

  Some of the differences between the effects of anger and other

  negative mood states are due to the greater sense of perceived

  control and confidence with anger.
• Positive mood is associated with modestly positive judgements

  about the future and increased risk taking in real life, particularly in

  men. Again, this seems to be related to the fact that some positive

  moods make people feel more confident in their judgement.
• Moral dilemmas: Emotion vs. cognition

  • Moral dilemmas create conditions in which strong emotions are

  opposed to cognition, in particular when the consequences involve

  people we are personally interacting with. Two much researched

  problems are the trolley problem and the footbridge problem.
• moral dilemmas

  • A dual-process model is used to interpret the findings and make new

  predictions. Originally, it was thought that the first process involved

  deontological (emotional) processing and the second utilitarian

  (cognitive) processing. However, a better distinction may be

  between intuitive processing and counterintuitive processing.