PSYC1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Prefrontal Cortex, Amygdala, Endorphins
Document Summary
Emotions: feelings or affect states that involve a pattern of cognitive physiological and behavioural reactions to events. Important adaptive functions eg. fear and alarm, intimate relationships, new ideas, achieve goals. Form of social communication - show internal states/intentions, in uence others (empathy, baby) Responses innate factors indicate stimuli with greatest potential to arouse emotion. Interpretations and meanings we attach to sensory stimuli. Anger and fear. human phobias involve primal stimuli. In uence how we express and act on emotions. Amygdala = early warning system of social threat + response to pos stimuli. Tendencies (related to motives, memories and action tendencies) expressive behaviours; observable emotional displays (infer emotion). Instrumental-response to stimulus. emotional displays contribute to species survival (adaptive value) Not always under conscious awareness - automatic response based on previous conditioning. Thalamus sends signals to cortex (interpretation) and amygdala (emotional reactions) - survival mechanism - fast reaction. Ns, similar culturally, universal biological emotion basis. different people have different appraisals.
