PSYC20007 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Institute For Operations Research And The Management Sciences, Electrodermal Activity, Catdog
10 May 2018
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Lecture 12
- The ability to ascribe value, or valence, (i.e., positive or negative) to events in the world is a
product of selective evolutionary processes and is evident across phylogeny (i.e., across the
range of species, from the most basic organisms through to the most complex). Value in this
sese efes to a ogaiss ailit to sese hethe eets ad stiuli i its eioet
are more or less desirable. Human emotions represent complex psychological and
physiological states that have evolved from simpler value mechanisms. It follows from this
evolutionary perspective that the range of emotions that an organism experiences will
reflect the complexity of its specific adaptive niche. For humans, this involves the adaptive
demands of physical, sociocultural, and interpersonal contexts. The importance of emotion
to the variety of human experience is evident in that what we notice and remember is not
the mundane, but events that evoke feelings of joy, sorrow, pleasure, and pain. Emotion
provides the basis for human social relationships and drives the best and worst in human
behaviour. Emotion exerts a powerful influence on our cognitive processes, including the
way in which we remember, reason, and is fundamental in the formation of our beliefs.
Emotional imbalances underpin the entire range of psychological disorders from neuroses to
psychoses. More than any other species, we are beneficiaries and victims of a wealth of
emotional experience. In this lecture I discuss a selection of the research that has
investigated the links between cognitive processes and emotions. In particular, we will
consider how emotions provide information to the cognitive information processing system
and we will explore how emotional processes can bias cognitive processes in ways that lead
to the imbalances seen in some psychological disorders.
-
- Feeling and thinking have long been thought to be inter-related by both philosophers and
psychologists. The quote on this slide is indicative of this belief. It comes from the American
philosophe ad logiia “usae K. Lage fo he odeful ook Mid: A Essa o
Hua Feelig . Neetheless, fo uh of the th Century, research in psychology
proceeded as if behavior, cognition, and emotion could be studied separately. Early work in
ogitie psholog took the ie that eotio as just hot oise i a otheise ool
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computational information processing system. This lecture considers a sample of the work
investigating the interplay between cognition and emotion that has flourished since the
s. Neetheless, thee has ee osideale deate as to hethe affect (i.e.,
emotion) should be treated as part of the cognitive representational system or as an entirely
separate mental faculty. Zajonc (1980) argued for a separate-systems view, suggesting that
affect often precedes and is distinct from cognitive processes. However, many of the more
recent models assume that emotions and other conceptual knowledge are represented
together, within a broad semantic network (e.g., Bowers, 1981). Certainly, categorising
ojets ad eets as haig eithe positie o egatie alee i.e., _is good, _is ad
must be one of the basic distinctions made at the semantic level, across a wide range of
species.
- Affect - refers generally to both moods and emotions
- Moods - low in intensity, diffuse, and relatively enduring; without a salient antecedent
cause and therefore little cognitive control, e.g. feeling good or feeling bad
- Emotions - more intense and short-lived than moods; usually have a definite cause and clear
cognitive content, e.g. anger or fear
- Definitions adapted from; Forgas, J. P. (1995). Mood and judgment: The affect infusion
model (AIM). Psychological Bulletin, 117, 39–66.
- Affect is the more general term and may be used to refer to both emotions and moods. An
emotion has the properties of a reaction; it often has an identifiable cause – a stimulus or
antecedent thought. It is usually an intense experience of relatively brief duration - the
person is usually well aware of the experience. On the other hand, mood tends to be more
subtle, longer-lasting, less intense and more in the background of consciousness. Mood is
more like a frame of mind that casts either a positive or negative (energetic/lethargic;
anxious/relaxed) context over experiences. Mood tends to be non-specific, unlike emotions
which are usually linked specifically to clear-cut and consciously available cognitive
representations about their antecedents. Emotions are usually focused on an identifiable
person, event, or object. In contrast, people may not be aware of their mood until attention
is drawn to it.
- Despite these definitions it can still be difficult to clearly separate moods from emotions.
Indeed moods are often the persistent after-effect of an emotional state. If someone has
just experienced a loss or failure, he or she will experience a sad emotion. Moreover, the
feeling may persist as a sad mood , especially if one mentally reviews the sadness-producing
events periodically. Indeed, researchers often invoke this strategy of mental review of
emotional events to induce a mood in experimental participants. Such mood inductions are
clearly using cognitions (memories or constructed images) to elicit emotions and moods.
- Cognitive-Behaviour-Therapy is based on the idea that, just as cognitions can be used to
arouse an emotion, so can they be used to either maintain or reduce it. The slides on
cognitive models of depression show how work in the area of memory mechanisms in
cognitive psychology has come to inform clinical theories of Depression.
- State → also mood or affect; transient and variable
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- Trait → stable personality characteristic, enduring characteristics of a person [angry,
impulsive, sensitive, anxious], traits tend to make people more likely to display
certain states
- Hot Cognition: emotion as information
- One way to think about the interplay between cognition and emotion is to consider emotion
as a source of information for cognitive processes.
- For example, emotional prosody in language ⇒ provides important information beyond
the meaning of the individual words.
- We talked about one aspect of prosody in the lecture on the principles of word recognition –
the rhythm or stress pattern of spoken language. The stress pattern provides important
information about word boundaries. Prosody has other aspects as well, including the
emotional tone of language. The tone of voice in which words are produced provides
important information about the meaning of the utterance over and above the forms of the
words themselves. The same utterance said in a different tone can have very different
ootatios. Coside the diffeet eaigs of the phase Good oe podued ith
either a happy or sarcastic tone of voice. It is for similar reasons that emoticons have been
adopted in text messaging – they help the reader to understand the intended emotional
content of the words
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Document Summary
Value in this se(cid:374)se (cid:396)efe(cid:396)s to a(cid:374) o(cid:396)ga(cid:374)is(cid:373)(cid:859)s a(cid:271)ilit(cid:455) to se(cid:374)se (cid:449)hethe(cid:396) e(cid:448)e(cid:374)ts a(cid:374)d sti(cid:373)uli i(cid:374) its e(cid:374)(cid:448)i(cid:396)o(cid:374)(cid:373)e(cid:374)t are more or less desirable. Human emotions represent complex psychological and physiological states that have evolved from simpler value mechanisms. It follows from this evolutionary perspective that the range of emotions that an organism experiences will reflect the complexity of its specific adaptive niche. For humans, this involves the adaptive demands of physical, sociocultural, and interpersonal contexts. The importance of emotion to the variety of human experience is evident in that what we notice and remember is not the mundane, but events that evoke feelings of joy, sorrow, pleasure, and pain. Emotion provides the basis for human social relationships and drives the best and worst in human behaviour. Emotion exerts a powerful influence on our cognitive processes, including the way in which we remember, reason, and is fundamental in the formation of our beliefs.
