PSYC20007 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Psychological Bulletin, Semantic Network, Cognitive Psychology
14 Jun 2018
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Lecture 11 - Tuesday 17 October 2017
PSYC20007 - COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
LECTURE 12
COGNITION & EMOTION
1. INTRODUCTION TO COGNITION & EMOTION
•Feeling and thinking have long been thought to be inter-related by both philosophers and
psychologists. The quote on this slide is indicative of this belief. It comes from the American
philosopher and logician Susanne K. Langer from her wonderful book “Mind: An Essay on
Human Feeling” . Nevertheless, for much of the 20th Century, research in psychology proceeded
as if behavior, cognition, and emotion could be studied separately. Early work in cognitive
psychology took the view that emotion was just “hot” noise in an otherwise “cool” computational
information processing system. This lecture considers a sample of the work investigating the
interplay between cognition and emotion that has flourished since the 1980’s. Nevertheless, there
has been considerable debate as to whether affect (i.e., emotion) should be treated as part of the
cognitive representational system or as an entirely separate mental faculty. Zajonc (1980) argued
for a separate-systems view, suggesting that affect often precedes and is distinct from cognitive
processes. However, many of the more recent models assume that emotions and other conceptual
knowledge are represented together, within a broad semantic network (e.g., Bowers, 1981).
Certainly, categorising objects and events as having either positive or negative valence (i.e., “_is
good”, “_is bad”) must be one of the basic distinctions made at the semantic level, across a wide
range of species.
AFFECT, FEELINGS, EMOTIONS
•Affect refers generally to both moods and emotions. Overarching term referring to feelings and
emotions.
•Moods are low in intensity, diffuse, and relatively enduring
•Without a salient antecedent cause and therefore little cognitive content
•Eg. feeling good or feeling bad.
•Emotions are more intense and short-lived than moods
•Usually have a definite cause and clear cognitive content
•Eg., anger or fear.
•Definitions adapted from; Forgas, J. P. (1995). Mood and judgment: The affect infusion model
(AIM). Psychological Bulletin, 117, 39–66.
•Affect is the more general term and may be used to refer to both emotions and moods. An
emotion has the properties of a reaction; it often has an identifiable cause – a stimulus or
antecedent thought. It is usually an intense experience of relatively brief duration - the person is
usually well aware of the experience. On the other hand, mood tends to be more subtle, longer-
lasting, less intense and more in the background of consciousness. Mood is more like a frame of
mind that casts either a positive or negative (energetic/lethargic; anxious/relaxed) context over
experiences. Mood tends to be non-specific, unlike emotions which are usually linked specifically
to clear-cut and consciously available cognitive representations about their antecedents. Emotions
are usually focused on an identifiable person, event, or object. In contrast, people may not be
aware of their mood until attention is drawn to it.
•Despite these definitions it can still be difficult to clearly separate moods from emotions. Indeed
moods are often the persistent after-effect of an emotional state. If someone has just experienced
a loss or failure, he or she will experience a sad emotion. Moreover, the feeling may persist as a
sad mood , especially if one mentally reviews the sadness-producing events periodically. Indeed,
researchers often invoke this strategy of mental review of emotional events to induce a mood in
experimental participants. Such mood inductions are clearly using cognitions (memories or
constructed images) to elicit emotions and moods.
•Cognitive-Behaviour-Therapy is based on the idea that, just as cognitions can be used to arouse
an emotion, so can they be used to either maintain or reduce it. The slides on cognitive models of
depression show how work in the area of memory mechanisms in cognitive psychology has come
to inform clinical theories of Depression.
Lecture 11 - Tuesday 17 October 2017
PSYC20007 - COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
COGNITION & EMOTION
• State
•Also ‘mood’, or ‘affect’
•Transient and variable
•Trait
•Stable personality characteristic
•Enduring characteristics of a person
•Angry, impulsive, sensitive, anxious
•Traits tend to make people more likely to display certain states.
HOT COGNITION: EMOTION AS INFORMATION
•One way to think about the interplay between cognition and emotion is to consider emotion as a
source of information for cognitive processes.
•For example, emotional prosody in language provides important information beyond the meaning
of the individual words. Infants use prosodic cues to tell the beginning and end of words.
•When she yells “John, come here!’ and then ‘John... come here.’ and in one case is mad and one is
seductive and both might have a spanking. Her tone tells the meaning/indexes the mood state.
•We talked about one aspect of prosody in the lecture on the principles of word recognition – the
rhythm or stress pattern of spoken language. The stress pattern provides important information
about word boundaries. Prosody has other aspects as well, including the emotional tone of
language. The tone of voice in which words are produced provides important information about
the meaning of the utterance over and above the forms of the words themselves. The same
utterance said in a different tone can have very different connotations. Consider the different
meanings of the phrase “Good one” produced with either a happy or sarcastic tone of voice. It is
for similar reasons that emoticons have been adopted in text messaging – they help the reader to
understand the intended emotional content of the words.
BASIC EMOTIONS
•Facial expressions also provide important non-
verbal information to the cognitive system
•Informs approach and avoidance behaviour
•Paul Ekman–the big 5 (6?)
•Anger
•Fear
•Disgust
•Happiness
•Sadness
•Surprise
•Biologically hard wired and universally recognised
facial expressions.
•Emotions may have basic categories that are able to
be labelled.
•Charles Darwin was one of the first to theorise that
emotions were biologically determined and
universal to human culture in his book “The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals”, published in 1872. However, the more
popularised belief during the 1950s was that facial expressions and their meanings were culturally
determined through behavioural learning processes. Through a series of studies, psychologist Paul
Ekman found a high agreement across members of diverse Western and Eastern literate cultures
on selecting emotional labels that matched facial expressions. The facial expressions he found to
be universal included those indicating anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.
Working with his long-time friend Wallace V. Friesen, Ekman demonstrated that the findings
extended to preliterate Fore tribesmen in Papua New Guinea. Ekman and Friesen found that the
Fore’s facial expressions for happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust were strikingly !
Lecture 11 - Tuesday 17 October 2017
PSYC20007 - COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
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similar to those found in other cultures. For example, when asked to imitate the expressions
associated with meeting an old friend or stumbling upon a decaying animal, they showed the same
patterns of eye and mouth muscle movements seen in Westerners under similar circumstances. The
fact that the Fore showed these facial “universals” despite little contact with representatives of
other cultures (or modern popular media) strongly suggested that Darwin’s view that expressions
are innate was correct.
COGNITION & EMOTION
•Another way to think about emotions is as states
represented in a two dimensional state-space.
•Valence
•Positive/pleasant
•Negative/unpleasant
•Arousal
•Calm
•Aroused
•Affect Grid: Lang et al
•Where would you place sadness, contentment, fear and
excitement?
•Nostalgia? Exhilaration?
•There are fairly blank areas.
•An alternative to the theory of Basic Emotions is to think
of emotions not as discrete states but as being represented
along two or three continuous dimensions. This is the so-
called Dimensional Approach. This allows us to locate the
range of emotional experience within a space defined by
those dimensions. For example, the work of Lang and
colleagues defines emotional experiences and concepts in
terms of a two-dimensional “state-space”, where the
valence (whether it is positive or negative in quality) of an emotion or concept and the level of
arousal (physiological response; excitement) associated with it serve to locate it within a two
dimensional grid. The image shows this two dimensional space and the locations for a number of
concepts within it, determined by asking people to rate images or words in terms of the level of
valence and arousal they associate them with. If you were to map different discrete emotions onto
the affect grid, where would sadness, contentment, fear and excitement be located? What about
emotions that seem to combine attributes that should be at opposite ends of a dimension – For
example nostalgia combines sadness/regret (negative valence) with positive valence in valuing
those things from the past. Exhilaration combines fear and pleasure (positive and negative
valence)....
•Notice that the distribution of concepts within the state-space has a C shape, where the right-
most centre part of the space is blank. This indicates that there are not many things that we find
both neutral in valence, yet highly arousing – if something is arousing, we tend to find it to be
either good or bad, but not neutral in valence.
MEMORY & EMOTION
→ Bradley et al. (1992)
•Participants studied images and rated them on the dimensions of valence and arousal. Their
memory for the images was then tested.
•Immediate and delayed recall was better for pictures rated as high on the arousal dimension,
regardless of valence (positive or negative)
•Recognition memory performance was also significantly faster for arousing stimuli, regardless
of valence.
•Explanation:
•Arousal functions as a kind of elaborative
Document Summary
Cognition & emotion: introduction to cognition & emotion, feeling and thinking have long been thought to be inter-related by both philosophers and psychologists. The quote on this slide is indicative of this belief. It comes from the american philosopher and logician susanne k. langer from her wonderful book mind: an essay on. Nevertheless, for much of the 20th century, research in psychology proceeded as if behavior, cognition, and emotion could be studied separately. Early work in cognitive psychology took the view that emotion was just hot noise in an otherwise cool computational information processing system. This lecture considers a sample of the work investigating the interplay between cognition and emotion that has flourished since the 1980"s. Nevertheless, there has been considerable debate as to whether affect (i. e. , emotion) should be treated as part of the cognitive representational system or as an entirely separate mental faculty.
