What do appraisal-based models say about affect?
experience of emotion is determined to a large extent by the way in which a situation is interpreted or appraised
What do process-based models say about affect?
models propose that appraisals can occur in parallel at multiple levels ranging from very low-level action tendencies right up to high-level conscious decisions
How are attention & perception influenced by affect?
- limitation in capacity leads to a high degree of selectivity in attention (selective attention)
- early vs late selection debate
- stimuli may acquire significance because of novelty of a stimulus, its intrinsic pleasantness, its certainty or predictability, the object’s general relevance to an individual’s goals, the situation’s compatibility with personal & social standards
-attentional bias for negative, especially threat-related, stimuli should be readily apparent
• Implicit, automatically
• can influence early or late
Behavioural studies –> visual search task
-measures how quickly pp detect a particular class if stimuli –> faces: find angry face
Behavioural studies –> visual search task ==> Treisman
single features ‘pop-out’ of a crowded display while conjunctions of features can only be detected by a slow serial search
Behavioural studies –> visual search task ==> what is the threat superiority effect?
• people were faster to pick out angry faces relative to happy faces, indicating an allocation of attention towards the angry facial expressions
Behavioural studies –> visual search task ==> What did Öhman et al. do & found in their experiment?
- initial visual search task counfounded
- created task & made sure that there are exactly the same number of visual feature differences between angry face & neutral face as there are between happy face & neutral face
- search for angry expressions is serial –> speed of attention shifts faster towards angry rather than happy expressions
==> sad faces did not lead to enhanced detection times, it was only angry expressions that resulted in faster detection
Behavioural studies –> visual search task ==> which effect was supported by Öhman et al.’s study?
==> threat superiority effect
- since only angry expressions that resulted in faster detection
- broadly compatible with appraisal-based accounts (threat stimuli likely to be conistently appraised as highly relevant)
Behavioural studies –> interference tasks
- stroop task –> emotional stroop task
- words varying in valence are presented in different coloured ink
–> name colour of ink while ignoring meaning of word
Behavioural studies –> interference tasks: findings of emotional stroop task
took longer for pp to name colour of negative words
Findings of study: perceptual sensitivity in the presence of negative stimuli
- pp were better able to see when emotional stimuli were present
- effects of emotion & attention interacted: emotion had a greater effect for the single-cue condition than for the multiple-cue condition& the highest sensitivity occurred when the cue was a single fearful face
How exactly can negative stimuli can have both direct & indirect effects on perception?
- indirect effect: ability to influence perception by magnifying the impact of attention –> attention prioritizes salient stimuli
- mere presence of a negative stimulus can have an effect very basic perceptual processes –> faster detection of negative stimuli
What can be concluded from fMRI studies about the influence of affect (or threat-related stimuli) on attention-perception or sensory processes?
–> amygdala
-evidence that neural representation of negative stimuli is boosted relative to neutral stimuli
–> studies: amygdala activity correlates with enhanced activity of neurons in the extrastriate cortex in the presence of emotional stimuli
-extrastriate cortex: involved in sensory processing
==> threat/danger: boosts sensory representations
==> amygdala increases activation in sensory cortex
What can be concluded from fMRI studies about the influence of affect (or threat-related stimuli) on attention-perception or sensory processes?
–> study with fixating house or face
-fixating house or face –>more activity in fusiform face area (FFA) when faces were being attended BUT also active by fearful expressions (no matter whether face attended)
o similar pattern for amygdala –> increased activation when fearful expressions were attended but does not decrease when faces were unattended –> potential neural mechanism that would allow the visual system to prioritize the processing of stimuli with threat value
==> enhanced activity in sensory cortex to fearful relative to neutral stimuli allow these stimuli to be noticed before other ones
What are two neural mechanisms in processing affective stimuli?
- Threat-related stimuli may directly activate amygdala –>modulates sensory cortex (feedback loops)
- Affective stimuli might directly activate parietal & frontal regions of brain that are involved with attentional control & these areas project to sensory processing areas
What can be concluded from ERP studies about the influence of affect (or threat-related stimuli) on attention-perception or sensory processes?
- -> P100
- -> C1
-P100 component: produced by neural activity in the striate cortex & is known to reflect changes in the allocation of attention
-study: P100 larger for negative than for positive pictures
-C1 (negative, 60-90 msec after stimulus onset):
• Earliest response of primary visual cortex
• Enhanced for negative stimuli that had been learned
• C1: measured for stimuli that were first affectively neutral; then fear conditioning
Do you remember high emotional situations much better or not?
–> Autobiographical memories
o Flashbulb memories e.g., Diana’s death, 9/11
o Study: high correlation (0.71) between participants’ ratings of the vividness of their memories & their ratings of how emotional the original event had been ==> high for traumatic as well very positive events
–> while memory for affective events might be very clear & vivid, the accuracy of these memories may not actually be any better than for more neutral events (not more accurate)
Do you remember high emotional situations much better or not?
–> Lab studies
-Remember/know paradigm:
• affectively negative stimuli were consistently remembered more accurately relative to either positive or neutral stimuli
• highly arousing pictures (both negative & positive) were better remembered than neutral pictures
• correct recognition of negative stimuli was more likely to be accompanied by a conscious recollection whereas feelings of familiarity did not increase for negative stimuli
-Study: affective quality of a stimulus can enhance the feeling of remembering & suggests that this occurs because of enhanced activity in amygdala
–> accuracy from negative vs neutral pictures did not differ
–> but negative pictures were characterized by primarily ‘remember’ judgements than ‘know’
–> due to higher activity in amygdala during ‘remember’ judgments for affective pictures
–> higher activity in parahippocampal cortex during ‘remember’ judgements for neutral pictures
Does affect influence only parts and/or certain details of a situation?
- research: affect may enhance the accuracy of memories for their central aspects/ gist of the scene (but not periphery)
o ‘weapon focus’ effect (Loftus) –> better at details, but worse at periphery
o Study: memory for peripheral details was inversely correlated with degree of arousal –> the more aroused people were by the sight of the needle, the less likely to identify the nurse who gave them injection
o ‘Narrowing of attention’ (Easterbrook) when emotionally aroused –>central part: detailed & periphery: little or no attention
–> Whether accuracy can be improved depends on central vs peripheral part of a scene
–> Subjective sense of remembering & the vividness of memory are clearly enhanced by affective significance of a scene or situation
–> Maybe due to extra rehearsal, enhanced encoding —> affective events may be better remembered because of indirect effects of affect on initial encoding & rehearsal or because they’re usually distinctive & unusual
By what processes or factors does affect influences things we can remember?
–> effect of arousal
- arousal –> activates amygdala –> modulates activity of hippocampus –> enhanced consolidation
- study: amygdala damage impairs memory for central aspects of scene, but not for peripheral ones
–> activity in amygdala during encoding of aversive emotional event is strongly correlated with subsequent recall of that event
–> activity in amygdala during encoding of non-emotional events did not correlate with subsequent recall
–> amygdala activation during encoding improves memory for emotional stimuli & hippocampal region activation for recall of neutral stimuli
By what processes or factors does affect influences things we can remember?
- -> effect of valence
- brain areas
- amygdala activity & correlation between amygdala & hippocampus–> related to subsequent memory for arousing words
- PFC & correlation between PFC & hippocampus activation –> subsequent memory for negative, but non-arousing words
By what processes or factors does affect influences things we can remember?
- -> effect of valence
- lab studies & flashbulb memories
- Lab conditions: no difference in accuracy of memory for positive & negative stimuli when equally arousing
–> consistent with flashbulb memories: highly arousing positive & negative events seem to be equally memorable
By what processes or factors does affect influences things we can remember?
- -> effect of valence
- biases
- Positivity bias –> our recollections of past events are biased towards positive rather than negative events
- Fading affect bias –> when reminisce, people perceive their lives as more positive than negative
By what processes or factors does affect influences things we can remember?
- -> effect of valence
- difference self-relevant vs other-relevant
maybe difference between self-relevant vs other-relevant –> positive self info more processed & negative info more processed relating to others
