Explain Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions
- 8 primary emotions in four opposing pairs
- intensity increases toward the center
- adjacent emotions blend to form complex emotions (joy + trust = love)
What is emotion?
complex, multi-component response to a meaningful event or stimulus
What are the components of emotion?
- subjective feeling
- physiological response
- behavioral expression
- cognitive appraisal
What did Darwin argue?
- emotions evolved because they helped ancestors survive and communicate
What are the dimensions of emotion
- Circumplex Model of Affect
- Valence - how pleasant or unpleasant the emotion feels
- Arousal - the intensity of physiological activation
Explain the broaden-and-build theory
- Broaden: positive emotions widen attention, thinking, and behavioral responses
- Build: over time, this builds lasting resources: social connections, resilience, and new skills
What does Damasio argue?
- emotions are integral in making decisions
Explain the Iowa Gambling Task
- patients w/ vmPFC damage could not develop this intuitive avoidance, continue to choose from disadvantageous decks, and fail to anticipate negative consequences
- demonstrates that emotion-based learning is essential for adaptive decision-making
Explain the connection between moral decision-making and vmPFC damage
- vmPFC mediates moral reasoning as it acts as a brake on decisions that feel personally harmful
- impaired emotional processing can lead to moral reasoning that appears logical but lacks normal human restraint
What are the different places that emotions arise from?
- distributed circuits
- amygdala
- prefrontal cortex
- insula
- anterior cingulate cortex
Explain the role of the amygdala
- threat detection
- emotional learning
- emotion perception
- detects biologically relevant stimuli (fearful faces)
- necessary for conditioned fear
Describe Patient SM
- describes herself as fearless and shows no conditioned fear responses
- demonstrates the amygdala’s critical role in fear learning and threat avoidance
- trouble recognizing fear in others and suggests that the amygdala is also critical for recognizing it in others
Explain the CO2 inhalation study
- fear from internal signals are still experienced by SM and others with bilateral amygdala damage
- experienced it from panic inhaling CO2
- tells us fear is not a single system but involves multiple neural pathways
Explain the low road (fast pathway)
- thalamus –> amygdala
- quick, automatic threat response before conscious awareness
Explain the high road (slower but accurate)
- thalamus –> sensory cortex –> amygdala
- allows detailed evaluation of the stimulus
Explain the role of the prefrontal cortex
- shapes, controls, and uses emotions to guide behaviors
- emotion regulation
- emotional valuation and decision-making
- cognitive reappraisal
Explain the amygdala-pfc communication
- brain’s emotion regulation circuit
- when the amygdala detects a threat it fires an alarm and the PFC evaluates the alarm and either heighten or dampen it
What is the role of the insula?
interoception: the sense of the body’s internal state
- answers the question to “how do I feel right now?”
Describe the posterior insula
receives raw body signals (heart rate, temp.)
Describe the anterior insula
integrates those signals with context to create conscious feelings
Explain the facial feedback hypothesis
- facial expressions can directly influence emotional experience
- body helps create emotions not just express emotions
