Exam 4 Emotions

 

Exam 4: Emotions Sunday, April 22, 2012 10:19 AM

1. Especially in terms of disorders, a lot of disorders arise from negative emotions or stress/aggression related. 2. 4 Basic aspects of emotion a. Feelings, subjective perceptions, something that you're feeling, subjective. Even though in the face of danger, everybody's facing the exact same situation, but unless you are somewhat weird, weird, you're probably going to be very frightened. frightened. Everyone can say it was very scary, but really that scary feeling is really your own. I cannot tell you how scared or not scared you are, or how strong that emotion was. The feeling itself is really subjective. Its something that’s impossible to measure. It's how you feel. We can m easure other things and correlate those responses and sortof read it as some sortof output as feelings that you are having. b. Physiological response, endocrine and autonomic systems. Hypothalamus is the main brain structure that’s going to drive this, because hypothalamus is the brain area that’s going to trigger release of hormones (stress hormone included) and also that's where a lot of the basic instinct processing begins and you can modulate the downstream brain areas. c. Behavioral response, overt output, partiall partially y driven by feelings or physiologic physiological al response. Running, etc. progr ams, the final output is that when you do well in an exam, you had to study very hard to get there and if you d. Motivational programs, didn't then the output is not quite nice, so to get to the final emotional point, there is also this motivation that drives you to get to the point. 3. What is emotion? Theories of emotion a. James Lange Theory: what you think emotion is, or what you are feeling is basically the readout of what your body is doing. So, if something happens in the environment and your body reacts to it, and then your brain/mind reads what's happening in your body and registers that as some sortof emotion. Direct relationship between autonomic system (whats happening in your body) and that basically tells your brain that you're feeling a certain way. Basically, something happ happens ens and you perceive/interpret it as t hat, scary or dangerous situation, heart rate will go up, and finally you interpret it as a particular emotion. b. If his theory is true, then people who have weak autonomic system or less of a reaction to this should show weaker emotion. If your body generally does not react very well, or If you don't have autonomic system that reacts very well, those people should feel less fearful or less joyous. i. Paralyzed people who do not get any feedback from body still feel all emotions, or aspect of emotions. ii. People who have pure autonomic failure, still report that they can feel emotion. iii. Also, if his theory is correct, increasing physiological response to certain situations should increase how you feel about that situation. A group of researchers did this experiment where they forced someone to hold a pen in a certain way to force them to look like they were smiling. And another group was asked to hold the pen in a certain way that mimiced a frown. The content was the same. iv. People who held the pen in the way that forced them to look like they were smiling thought the comic strip was funnier than ones who were frowning. Up to a certain point, changing your body reaction can change how you feel in a given situation. v. Moebius syndrome--rare genetic disorder where certain cranial nerves that control your facial muscles are not fully developed and therefore your face muscles are paralyzed when you're born. You can't move your facial muscles at all. Look very flat. No facial expression wh whatsoever. atsoever. Doesn Doesn't 't affect intelligence. They still feel emotions. Go through plastic surgery to make it seem like they are smiling. c. Different degree of emotions i. Many are innate, kids or babies can start feeling these emotions ii. If some of them are too excessive, some disorders can arise from excessive emotion. Sadness-->depression. Joyful-->mania. Ocd-->too vigilant with surroundings surroundings iii. Universal facial expressions of emotions, cross cultural, paralinguistic d. How do we control our facial expression? 2 ways i. Cortical (voluntary): moves your facial muscles, transmitted through through some of the cranial nerves, esp 5 & 7, facial and trigeminal muscles. If you want to move your cheek, your cortex will kick in. 1) People with motor cortex damage can't move facial muscles but still show emotional facial expression. ii. Subcortical (involuntary/emotion based): subconscious level, heavily based on emotion, emotional expressions on your base are driven by subcortical activity. 1) People with Parkinson's disease can move their facial muscles fine, but many times there is a flat affect. Emotional expression through the face is not as robust as people who don't have Parkinson's. iii. Being able to read someone else's emotion and responding responding in a certain way is very important for social interactions. All of this is a complicated integration of controlling emotion, assessing behavior, and looking at whose around you. Driven by cortical functions, especially prefrontal cortex. iv. Orbitofron Orbitofrontal tal cortex. 1) Phineas Gage. Worked on railroad, iron rod went through his face, through the frontal part of the brain. Personality and social skills changed after the accident. Before: hardworking and nice. After: didn't want to work, cursed, gambled money. Autopsy showed heavy damage in orbitofrontal cortex area. 2) Regulating emotional behavior--orbitofrontal cortex a) Receives a lot of information from many brain areas that control emotional response, they feed into

 

Biopsychology Page 1

 

orbitofrontal cortex, and it sends information back. v. Limbic area 1) Fear conditioning. 2) You're walking in the woods, come across snake. Visual cortex goes into thalamus, some into occipital cortex, some goes straight into amygdala, and activates amygdal amygdala. a. Increase heart rate, blood pressure, signals fight or flight signal. a) Visual cortex information eventually comes back to amygdala. b) Amygdala holds this this information and the next time you come across this place, you are more vigilant and your heart rate and blood pressure goes up. Or when you see a coiled rope that looks like a snake, you generalize your fears to that. Amygdala is important in holding memory and generalizing fear to other object that may resemble what you're afraid of. c) Experiment: Monkeys had amygdala removed. They showed overall decreased fear response to things. Calm and placid. Displayed less than normal fear for snakes, or to more dominant males. However, that can lead into weird social dynamics because monkey society has hierarchy. The weak monkeys are supposed to be submissive to dominant monkeys. If a weak monkey that has amygdala damage doesn't submit, more likely to be beat up, etc. d) In humans, amygdala damage doesn't really result in loss of emotion. However, impairment is shown in subtle situations. It affects their ability to judge whether someone is trustworthy or not. Influences ability to recognize emotions in pictures, but not a big issue in real life. Learn to pick up signs from other facial features. e.g, how much whites of eyes you show can indicate fearful or happy expression. vi. Amygdala and emotional memory 1) context, attacked, unconditional stimulus is something bad that happened, dark alley serves as conditioned stimulus. Next time you walk in dark alley, even if there is no one around you, you can show fear response. Avoid area. Or if you must walk there, your heart rate might go really fast. Direct fear conditioning is not needed. If your friend is mugged in a dark alley, you learn, or your heart rate goes up. 2) PTSD: environmental cues that were present when present w awful situation, when you come across the cue, can trigger fear response. 3) Aggression and stress converge onto same endocrine and autonomic system. Adaptive behavior. In the face of certain things, you can be very stressed out about or aggression. When you are showing a lot of stress response without aggression, fear and anxiety. Control over situation is shown through aggressive behavior. How you cope with stressor that leads to the degree of response you have. 4) Aggression starts in amygdala and feeds into downstream system. 5) Testosterone (steroid hormone) plays a crucial role in controlling aggressive behavior. a) Rats: amount of fighting attacks before and after animals were castrated. After castration, fighting episode decreases. Castration removes testosterone. Also applies to females. b) Females that were given testosterone show more aggressive behavior. c) Humans: High testosterone, medium testosterone, low testosterone groups. Rape and murder, higher percentage of people who have higher levels of testosterone compared to drug offenders.

 

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