Cognition and Emotion
1.
Emotions consist of 3 components
1. Physiological changes that are not conscious (autonomic,
sympathetic, parasympathetic and endocrine system
activation); fight or flight response
2. The person’s subjective feeling/interpretation of the emotion
also known as APPRAISAL
3. Associated behavior as a result of the emotion
1. Lazarus and Folkman: emotion less important than the
appraisal and behavior that follows
Lazarus’s Appraisal Theory
– Definition: evaluations related to how a situation will
impact one’s well being (Lazarus)
• Benefit appraisal = positive emotion (aka Primary)
• Harm appraisal = negative emotion (aka Secondary)
• Active interpretation (appraisal) is the psychological
(cognitive) aspect to emotion (aka Outcome)
(Lazarus, 1975)
Lazarus and Folkman’s Research on Appraisals (1984, 1988)
One’s experience of stress can be influenced by:
–Threat vs. Challenge appraisal
–Belief in one’s coping abilities
»Hardiness (Kobasa)
–Motivation, self efficacy, locus of control
–Social networks/connections/support
2 Strategies for Dealing with Stressful Situations
• 1. Problem focused coping: aimed at changing/solving the problem
• 2. Emotion focused coping: aimed at dealing with the
emotional responses
Approach
Avoidance
Problem
Focused
Analyze reasons for
errors and correct
them
Try again and don’t
worry about it
Emotion
Focused
Use relaxation
techniques to reduce
stress
Ignore the situation
as if it didn’t really
bother you
Biological Factors in Emotion
– LeDoux (1999) describes two biological pathways for
emotion in the brain
• Short route: from Thalamus to Amygdala (aka Direct
Pathway)
• Long route: from Thalamus to Sensory cortex to
Hippocampus to Amygdala to Brain stem to body for
response (aka Indirect Pathway)
Long route accounts for the appraisal portion of an emotional response
Existence of both long and short routes allows for greater flexibility/efficiency
of responses
The Two Factor Theory: Combining Cognition and
Physiology
• Schachter and Singer (1962)
– emotion is a function of both cognitive factors and physiological
arousal
– people search the immediate environment for emotionally
relevant cues to label and interpret unexplained physiological
arousal
Emotion and a Cognitive Process: Flashbulb
Memories
• Why are some events so
hard to forget, even if we
would like to?
– Flashbulb memory: vivid and detailed memories of highly
emotional events that are effortlessly encoded (Brown and Kulik,
1977)
– 73 of 80 subjects reported flashbulb memories of personal
events
VS
• Role of the
is critical in flashbulb formation, adding an
emotional cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters that assign a
significance to the event that separate it from other events
• While emotion can strengthen memories, emotion does not
necessarily make memories more accurate
Neisser (1982) Questions Validity/Reliability of Flashbulb
Memories
• Flashbulb accuracy can be influenced by the following:
1.
Narrative Convention (the need to make the memory a
coherent story)
Place, setting, context and audience
Our own personal Schemas
Media coverage (see 9/11 research from APA article)
Neisser’s Study
2.
3.
4.
5.
1.
2.
Questioned subjects 24 hours after the Challenger explosion, then
again 2 years later
40% had distorted/different memories at second reporting
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHULrCM
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