Cog/Aff Midterm

• Emotion Theory 
• emotions exist because they have survival and propagation value 
• honed by natural selection 
• influenced William James

• Emotion Theory 
• emotions are created by or simply are autonomic responses 
• Bodily responses, both voluntary and involuntary, precede and cause the subjective experience of emotion and is indistinguishable from bodily sensations.
• Best supported: bodily responses and sensations play an integral and sometimes causative role in the subjective experience of emotion. 
• Most debunked: differences between emotions is created by differences in bodily responses and sensation.
• people paralyzed from the neck down should be emotionless, which is not true

• Emotion Theory 
• a decision making theory, in which emotion is conceptualized as integral to reasoning and decision making 
• Implies that there is an optimal level of involvement of emotion in decision making, and that too much or too little emotion hurts the quality of judgment 
• Updated version of James-Lange Theory 
• Differs in that it considers emotion to be the product of many more physiological responses than just automatic responses 
• lumps in motor behaviors, facial expressions, endocrine changes, and neurotransmitter modulation. 
• was able to make bodily differentiation of emotional states seem more credible

• Emotion Theory 
• appeared to disprove the James-Lange theory
• emotion precedes physical changes associated with the emotion. 
• Suggests that when presented with a stimulus for emotion, the resulting sensory information travels directly to the thalamus

• physiological reactions and emotional experience occur simultaneously, and neither is causative of the other. 
• accounts for how the same physiological responses can be associated with more than one emotion (angry and fear)
• considered outdated because emotions do not originate in the thalamus

• Emotion theory 
• suggests that emotion has two components: undifferentiated physiological arousal of the autonomic nervous system, and the cognitive interpretation of that arousal suggested that physiological arousal does precede emotion (James-Lange), but autonomic does not produce varied enough sensations to create different emotional states  
• it is the cognitive interpretation that differentiates one emotion from another 
• Adrenaline Study: given an adrenaline or placebo shot.  Participants were given false information about what the shot would do and a confederate was instructed to act in a manner consistent the explained effects.  Participants reported feeling the same as the confederate.
• High bridge study: female confederate gathered information on a high bridge and a low bridge.  Participants on the high bridge more often thought the woman was interested in them because of increased physiological responses

people tend to be more altruistic towards family members as a selfish attempt to preserve their gene pool.

behaving altruistically towards others in the hope of others being altruistic in return later.

to look good to other people in general

witnessing the distress of others is distressing because of a process of imagining oneself in their circumstances.

• observe a confederate getting a shock for failing a task
• easy escape and difficult escape conditions for participants
• asked to do the experiment again and take the place of the confederate 
• those who showed empathy and those from the easy escape condition volunteered more often

humans have a universal set of basic emotions which are associated with the same set of facial expressions and other manifestations across cultures

humans are able to interpret the same facial expressions in the same way across cultures

• a genuine smile that involves the eyes/orbicularis oculi 
• coincide with activity in the left anterior of the cortex

• took 3000 photos of different people making facing depicting 6 emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise 
• 80% of people across cultures were able to guess the correct emotion

• The fore people had no exposure to TV, film, or other western media
• where told a story that provoked one of the 6 emotions. 
• were then shown pictures of people making faces to match the 6 emotions and asked to select which emotion was experienced
• Fore had 80-90% accuracy
• Same experiment was done in reverse at a college campus with similar results except for fear

• culture-specific deep values regarding the appropriate and inappropriate contexts in which to display particular emotions
• used to explain evidence of differences in the expression of emotion between cultures

• US and Jap students watched an upsetting video
• half watched the video alone, while the other half watched with an "authority figure" standing by
• alone group: both races showed disgust
• Figure group: Japs suppressed disgust, US increased disgust

some cultures teach a stylized way of expressing some emotions - particularly while expressing the emotion out of politeness rather than when driven by a strong emotional state

• emotions are more consistently related to the social functions which the fill
• the socio-cultural environment mediates the experience of emotion, and the development of the emotional processes
• "emotional scripts"

• all cultural groups have a set of key ideas that have traditionally been transmitted to new generations and kept alive within the culture 
• these "core ideas" select and organize socio-psychological processes, customs, norms, practices, and institutions, which bring the core ideas into the real world and ensure that the individuals within the culture have a real world experience of the core cultural ideas
• "the local world:" the settings, circumstances, and situations that make up an individual's daily experience and thus shape emotion

• all behavior is caused by mental processes 
• the mind is a computer

• Gestalt Psychologists, although objectives were quite different 
• Neuropsychology - largest concern of cog psych 
• computer science - most important early influence

• came up with the idea of the computer before if ever existed 
• developed the "Turing Machine" which is a symbol manipulating device that can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer

• rejected radical behaviorism
• Came up with the magical number 7 +/- 2 for 7 pieces of information humans can hold in memory
• founded the center for cognitive studies which led to the birth of cognitivism 
• promoted the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive sciences

• coined the term cognitive psychology
• did work with A.I. and found that a lot of the principles of information processing applied to humans 
• linked human cognition to a computer

refers to the registration of physical stimulation through sensory organs

refers to the process of becoming aware of sensory information through the modulation, integration, and interpretation of sensation

• Began with the writing of Johannes Muller in the mid 1800s
• Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (a student of millers) developed the trichromatic theory of color vision which states there are separate cells in the eye for the 3 primary colors 
• later opposed by Ewald Herring's theory of opponent processes, which stated light receptor cells in the eye were each excited by one color and inhibited by an opposite color (explains color blindness is red/green and blue/yellow)

classified as a physiological illusion, which are the result of a direct effect of an atypical stimuli on the sensory perceptual systems

the product of an interaction between our sensation/perception and our thinking/learning (straight line illusions)

once an object has been perceived as an identifiable entity, it tends to be seen as a stable object despite variations in lighting, angles, or distance

• first detect specific features of stimuli
• then our perceptual systems combine those features to create complex perceptual forms
• then we finally recognize the stimulus for what it is
• also called feature analysis

• initially perceive the while of the form and create a hypothesis about the nature of the stimulus as a whole 
• subsequently we examine isolated features of the stimulus as a means of testing our hypothesis about the whole 
• suggests that innate mental processes enable people to maintain perceptual constancy

• critical of behaviorists views of language and specifically Skinner 
• introduced generative grammar: creating instances of language which are outside the bounds of their previous experience 
• introduced language acquisition device (LAD): an innate faculty for the leaning of language that has limited access from the rest of the brain 
• claimed people are born with a universal grammar which is ready to absorb the first language they encounter 
• has two parts

• surface structure: specific rules governing phonetics and grammar
• deep structure:  more abstract and can encompass all the varieties of grammar within human languages

• an early champion of Chomsky's view of language
• suggested the mind is not a single all-purpose problem solving program, but a series of specialized programs or modules, designed to deal with particular kinds of tasks 
• suggested that the brain/mind has a set of central processes, and a small set of specialized modules for things like language that contain all instances of our innate understanding 
• two principles govern the modules

• informational encapsulation: each module has its own information processing routine, and its own knowledge of other module; it may not have access to the routines and knowledge of other modules, nor does it need these in order to operate
• domain specificity:  a module in only activated when it receives input from the sort of data it is designed to process; it will not be active if it thinks it is not needed

• Massive Modularity:  proposed by John Toby, stated the mind does not have just a few specialized modules for sensory inputs, but a vast number of highly specialized modules and the mind may not have central processes at all.
• the processes are a result of natural selection

• encoding - the transformation of a sensory input into a memory representation 
• storage - the holding of material in stored representational form
• retrieval - accessing the stored memory

• operates after the perceptual system registers a stimulus
• hold this information for a very brief amount of time

• there are separate STM and LTM systems 
• rehearsal can store information in STM indefinitely, but it is replaced by new information

• Endel Tulvig suggested long term memory can be divided into separate systems for implicit and explicit/declarative memories
• encoding specificity:  specific memories are retrieved from long-term memory by means of retrieval cues

• primarily employed in the learning of motor skills (never forget how to ride a bike)
• considered implicit memory - previous experience informs the performance of a new task 
• priming effects fall under this category

• requires active recall
• can be further divided into semantic memory and episodic memory

• allows the encoding of abstract knowledge learned from experience, and is comprise of abstract representations of facts taken out of context 
• ex. Elvis is the king of rock n roll

• contains information specific to a particular context 
• stores memories of specific experiences (e.g., time and place of an event) 
• autobiographical memory 
• can be inaccurate

• any model o fmind which suggests that the mind is an information processing system, that the information in the mind take the form of a symbollically represented language of thought, and that the mind uses specific algorithms to manipulate input to yield different output 
• cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology
• more holistic

• conceptualize mental or behavioral phenomena as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of basic units
• neural network models 
• more reductionistic

• accretation - assimilating new information into existing schema without any change, the lowest form of processing 
• Tuning - recognition that the existing schema cannot assimilate the new knowledge as-is, so an existing schema is modified so that it can assimilate the new knowledge 
• Restructuring - involves the creation of an entirely new schema, which categorizes the new information on the basis of why it did not fit an old schema, involves the most cognitive effort

• drawing of general conclusions from a small set of observed instances 
• categorization, pattern recognition

• a special form of reasoning that kicks in only when we are working in particularly knowledge-rich area
• starts with big picture and works its way down to details that need addressing
• prejudice

• a process of transferring information from a familiar problem to an unfamiliar but similar problem
• looking for commonalities
• problem solving by feel