Cognitive Neuroscience Chapter 9: Emotion

Front 1

S.M- bilateral damage to amygdala

Back 1

deficits in identifying facial expressions of fear- inability to automatically use information from eyes, can't draw fear
retains semantic knowledge of fear

Front 2

Dimensional approach to emotion

Back 2

emotional states vary on a continuum and are not discrete
characterized by valence and arousal (intensity)

Front 3

Papez Circuit

Back 3

network of brain areas thought to be involved with emotion
hypothalamus, anterior thalamus, cingulate gyrus, and hippocampus (amygdala, OFC, and parts of BG= limbic system)
vague membership and relationship with emotion
now known that neural systems used depend on situation

Front 4

Information to amygdala

Back 4

Low road- directly from thalamus to amygdala, quick and dirty
High road- relays through thalamus, then to sensory cortex to amygdala, slower and more accurate

Front 5

Fear conditioning

Back 5

implicit learning- form of classical conditioning where US is aversive
Extinction- CS no longer paired with US, CR will go away

Front 6

Amygdala Damage and Fear conditioning

Back 6

SP- bilateral damage to amygdala, fails to acquire CR during fear conditioning
amygdala modulates autonomic nervous system
Blue square and shock- SP only shows changes in skin conductance to shock
aware that blue square predicts it
hippocampal damage elicits opposite response

Front 7

Explicit memory for emotional events

Back 7

Emotional arousal (+ or -) activates amygdala
Necessary for normal indirect emotional responses to stimuli whose emotional properties are learned explicitly
Enhances the strength of declarative memories for emotional events by modulating storage of memories
arousal influences memory, blocked by lesions to amygdala
forgetting for arousing events is slower- not shown in amygdala patients
arousal can influence after initial encoding- strengthen consolidation

Front 8

Facial expressions and the amygdala

Back 8

activity increases when viewing faces (greatest for fear), responds to subliminal presentation
also processing sad faces

Front 9

Group evaluation

Back 9

Implicit stereotyping- amygdala activation when viewing other race faces
Due to perceptions of similarity, not race

Front 10

OBFC

Back 10

activated when identifying angry facial expressions and hearing angry prosody

Front 11

Anterior Insula

Back 11

linked to identification and experience of disgust- first hand and empathetic disgust activate insula

Front 12

Regions

Back 12

lots involved in emotion, never get a solitary emotion in one region
Fear is most evolutionarily necessary- most specific region (amygdala)