PSY 430 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex, Autonomic Nervous System, Prefrontal Cortex
Document Summary
Reading emotions from facial expressions and body position (indicate likely actions) Ex: anxiety before a test can motivate you to study harder (yerkes-dodson law) Fear leads to escape / anger leads to attack. Allows us to make quick decisions and help make moral decisions. The consequences of our decisions have emotional considerations. Emotions are an important component to moral decisions. Failure to anticipate the unpleasantness of an event can lead to bad decision making. Contemplating moral decisions activates the prefrontal cortex, cingulate gyrus, and amygdala. Damage to the prefrontal cortex impaired decision making of all kinds. Leads to impulse decision - making without pausing to consider consequences. Steams from failure to anticipate unpleasantness of an outcome (phineas gage) Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex show decreased guilt. Psychologist de ne emotion in terms of 3 components: Emotional situations arouse the autonomic nervous system. Each situation evokes its own special mixture of sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal.
