Emotions and Cognition

This weeks’ reading focused mostly on the internal processes and systems leading to emotional experience and expression. It took us into the internal experience of what is an emotion. There seems to be general questions such as, where do our emotions come from, and where do our responses come from? What controls them? Various aspects were put forward in all the readings, such as the importance of our working memory, the central role of the amygdala, the limit between feelings and consciousness and the difference between automatic responses and responses learned by experience.
The difference between primary and secondary emotion I think is crucial in order to understand the different reactions and their origins. In this difference lies the distinction between innate, survival reactions and the more complex reactions of secondary emotions. In the case of primary emotions, our responses depend on survival, instinctual regulation. We will therefore act in order to assure survival, the best way we can. Secondary emotions are more complex. They depend on more aspects and processes, such as the process of decision-making, its relation to memory and passed experience and even take place in a different part of the brain. What happens without consciousness such as innate emotions happens in the old brain structures whereas when the situation is more complex, it occurs in systems in the neocortex, a modern sector of the brain.
The importance of our working memory I thought was very interesting and so was the importance of our memory in the process of responding to a situation. Working memory would be the “origin” of cousciousness. Both Damasio and LeDoux described as “concrete” the question of consciousness and emotion, which I thought was very striking.
To what extend are our emotion conscious? And the question of controlling our emotions still remains.
About controlling our emotions, Damasio talked about the chemical substances part of the emotional experience in our brains. He also mentioned medicines that we can use to control our emotions. I was wondering about the influence of medicine on our emotion in the long run. How does it influence our brain and how can we get out of it?
The body mind connection seems to be very important. Which one governs the other tends to be the main question, and what comes first? We can’t deny the role of both mind and bodily expression in emotional experience, they are strongly connected. The keyword seems to be “interaction”. The answer to most of our question about what comes first and what controls the experience seem to be answered when thinking of it as an interaction between several crucial systems. Finally, another main concern is the definition of a feeling. The readings clearly put consciousness as the main aspect of a feeling. Consciousness makes the experience a feeling. The central role of the body is also crucial in this definition as our feelings let us “mind the body” (Damasio, p159).

Reading Response for 3/28/07

I was relieved this week to start reading about the cognitive
experience of emotions, and learn more about the distinctions between
emotion and feeling, however subjective the distinctions are (some
people don't make a distinction, I refer to Damasio's discussion).
It's interesting that sometimes we are more aware of our thought
process than other times, when we simply process information and don't
really know how we came up with something. Sometimes I enjoy trying to
trace back a certain thought or conclusion, and it can be extremely
difficult because of the myriad associations, past and present, that
are involved. Like LeDoux explained, in working memory we can
temporarily store about seven pieces of information, but each piece is
bound to have a thousand other associations along with it, like
LeDouxs' example of the seven continents and their associations. Thus,
although we may only be able to hold seven pieces of information to
compare, contrast, and process at any given moment, our brains are
simultaneously utilizing much more information that that, through the
associations which the information holds to past memories and
experiences. In both the LeDoux and Damasio reading emphasis is put on
the fact that working memory is made up of long-term memories of past
experiences, and the new information continually being gathered from
the external environment. Feelings, in LeDouxs' view, come from the
conscious recognition of the information that has been processed by
emotion systems that come to be represented in working memory.

Another important aspect of the conscious experience of emotion (i.e.
feelings) is arousal. The arousal spectrum goes from "completely
unconscious (in a coma), to asleep, to awake but drowsy, to alert, to
emotionally aroused" (LeDoux, pg. 289). LeDoux emphasizes the fact
that the level of arousal may contribute to the level of an
individuals' attention to and awareness of their emotional state. In a
highly arousing emotional state, an individual is more likely to be
fully aware of their emotional state (how they "feel"), and the
experience will be encoded as a highly emotional one, which, according
to previous readings, tells is that it will be remembered more fully
or vividly. In the same vein, Damasio feels that the essence of
conscious feelings are "that continuous monitoring, that experience of
what your body is doing while thoughts about specific contents roll
by" (Damasio, pg. 145).

While reading "The Cognitive Control of Emotion" article by Ochsner
and Gross, questions that came up for me were about ADD, and interest.
The article discussed attention and cognitive control in association
with emotion regulation, and I was wondering how this affects people
with ADD. People with ADD suffer from and attention deficit, as the
name implies, but in my experience people with this "disorder" do not
lack emotional capacity or the ability to express emotions. I also
wonder what role interest plays (because my research paper was about
interest as a primary emotion). Attention in general often has to do
with someone's interest in an object or event, whether it is positive
or negative, pleasurable or unpleasant. I question how much interest
is involved with the processing or events and how much individual
interest has to do with the processing of emotion.

Emotions and cognition

There was much overlap of the topics covered in the readings for this week as both LeDoux and Damasio try to explain and understand emotions. They both talk about the evolution of life and try to consider how emotions have become such a large part of our human landscape. Damasio eloquently pulls apart the evolution of life as he explains that the very first simple organism was without a CNS and performed actions spontaneously or in response to a specific stimulus, and that in turn these actions can be characterized as the organism’s behavioral pattern. It was only later on in the progression of life on this planet that organisms developed a nervous system and a brain. He states that organisms can either have behavior but no mind, have behavior and cognition but no thinkable organism can have a mind but no action (believe in ghosts?).
He also goes through a rudimentary explanation of the brain by stating that “upstairs in the cortex there is reason and willpower, while downstairs in the subcortex there is emotion and all that weak, fleshy stuff” . The upstairs region is believed to be evolutionarily the most recent development of the brain while downstairs houses primal elements of behavior that aided us through the years of cave dwelling. He goes on to say that there has been “evidence that longevity, a likely reflection of the quality of reasoning, is correlated not only with increased size of the neocortex as expected but also with increased size of the hypothalamus, the main compartment of downstairs.” Here is where he draws a connection to the development of the structures that house rationality and emotions and states that they are both necessary to the movement in time of our species. But he also draws upon the idea while referencing William James that the mind and body are connected to each other through the bridge of emotion. This bridge is so important for the human race because it facilitates communication between people and between species.

From here I am reminded of how LeDoux concluded his book. He states at the end of chapter nine that the amygdala has more control over the cortex than the cortex has over the amygdala. He states that there are two possibilities in the future of our brain structuring. Seeing that the neocortex is ever expanding it might gain more and more control over the amygdala possibly allowing future humans to better control their emotions. He also postulates that due to the equality of connecting fibres between the neocortex and the amygdala, the future may behold a time where there is no more struggle between thought and emotions “but a more harmonious integration of reason and passion” . From here I wonder how much LeDoux would agree with Damasio’s view over the importance of emotions in the processes that he discuses extensively in part one while referencing to Phineas Gage and Elliot. I really enjoyed LeDoux book but perhaps that is where I get lost sometimes, because he does not ever really formulate his own opinions but instead covers extensively the research as it pertains to emotions and the brain. But this may be what makes him a highly revered scientific writer, as he brings together scientific facts in order to paint the landscape of emotions and the brain. I guess that is something we will cover in class in the next few weeks.

The goal of Barrett and Ochsner’s research is to identify how appraisal patterns give rise to complexities of emotional experiences, expression and regulation. I wonder why do some people respond one way to an emotional and another person acts in a seemingly different manner. Despite the argument that some of these behaviors are inherited and reinforced, and the role that memory plays in emotional responses, I still wonder about what is responsible for the marked difference in emotional behavior between people be it in automatic emotion processing or controlled emotion processing? I guess the figure on page 273 of Ledoux's book will serve as a map in understanding this dilemma as well as analyzing the their research findings in that different brain structures are responsible for different emotional behavior. I had some trouble understanding some of their findings. For example, what do they mean by “core affective life of the individual”p.29? This paper was well organized and descriptive but I feel that due to my lack of knowledge about neuroscience I would need help in understanding the research and its implications.

3.7.07

The readings this week focused on an individual’s capacity to remember particular things. When I first began the readings (and particularly, in McGaugh), I wondered how memory had anything to do with emotions. Prior to this, I’ve never really made any concrete connection between the two; they’ve only seemed to be abstract concepts that have somehow indirectly related to each other. After reading chapter five, it made a little bit more sense, but I still feel as though we’re left with the question: How much should we remember? I found the issue of selectivity particularly important; memory is allegedly influenced by the impact of certain events, but what dictates the impact? Norepeniphrine, or an alternate stress hormone? We never really think about what our "brain" chooses to do (or automatically does) when any type of event happens (be it significant or insignificant). What we should and should not know, as far as memory is concerned, still seems to be out of our control; and that might be a good thing. I felt as though this reading brought up one of the key controversies in bioethics right now; that is, is it acceptable to use beta/stress blockers to "downsize" the effects of particular events, and who is capable of judging what events are worthy of this particular type of medication? Our innate biological functions seem to work as a result of some sort of evolutionary process (even though this may not be entirely proven, yet), and one has to wonder why, exactly, the brain chooses particular things to remember (whether it be September 11th, or what was for lunch last Thursday). I still feel like I’m left with no answers, and I still want a solution to the Amygdala-hippocampus debate (if there is one)!

March 7 - Memory and Emotion

A common theme of this week’s readings is stress and its relation to emotion and memory. McGaugh reviews the evidence that memory consolidation can be enhanced or inhibited with drugs over a wide variety of memory tasks. For such improvement or determent to occur, the drugs must be administered soon after the task, as it has been shown that memory consolidation takes place only a short period of time after something is learned. Whether through direct or indirect action on the amygdala, memory consolidation is enhanced by stimulation and hindered by inhibition. For instance, electrical stimulation of the amygdala after training in a task improves memory. Norepinephrine release in the amygdala is also an important aid in memory consolidation. Norepinephrine levels can be increased through the differing actions of the stress hormones epinephrine and cortisol. The release of these and many other stimulating hormones and neurotransmitters can be pharmacologically induced, with the effect of aiding memory consolidation. On the other hand, if norepinephrine is inhibited by drug administration, the opposite effect (consolidation hindrance) will occur.

Artificially induced stress is not the only kind that acts on the amygdala to enhance memory. It has been shown that people have stronger and more accurate memories of emotionally arousing words, movies, and general experiences. Still, that even the most emotional and frequently revisited memories are not 100% accurate is a point that repeatedly appears in the literature. Elizabeth Loftus’s work, highlighting the realities of false memories such as being lost in a mall and being sexually abused by a baby-eating, animal-loving cult member, is a testament to this.

Stress does not always have a positive effect on memory. The failed synthesis of cortisol (?) can result in the temporary blocking of well-learned information, as in the case of a fully prepared actor forgetting his lines. In addition, prolonged levels or a single event of high stress can override the hippocampus’s attempts to keep the stress in check, thereby compromising its normal function in explicit memory. It is also possible that the memory failure is partially due to the fact that stress interferes with long-term potentiation in the hippocampus. Autopsies of monkeys living under the ever-present stress of a dominant male revealed that the structure was visibly degenerated. The impairment of the hippocampus along with an unaffected amygdala would explain why a victim might not explicitly recollect a particularly traumatic event, but still fall privy to the devastating emotions that are associated. This evidence does not put Freud’s theory of repression in a good light. LeDoux once again successfully points evolutionary importance: the amygdala is facilitated by stress and the hippocampus impaired by it so that we can react to danger rather than think about it.

Arousal of the amygdala does improve memory, but at significant costs. I substitute "arousal" for "stress" here because emotional experiences need not be "stressful," per say, to be firmly established in memory; LaBar and Cabeza note that amygdala activation during encoding correlates positively with delayed recall accuracy for emotionally arousing pictures that are both attractive and aversive. Nevertheless, it is tempting to conclude that traumatic memories are the ones that have the most powerful effect on memory. Whether taken from a psychoanalytic or behavioral stance, anxiety is the result of traumatic learning experiences. Anxiety disorders like phobias, panic, PTSD, and OCD are fairly common problems that are all related to fear conditioning, and they have no easy solution. LeDoux proposes a few possibilities as to why these conditions are particularly resistant to extinction in humans: abnormal functioning of the medial prefrontal cortex, which also may be due to stress; evolutionary "preparedness" to fear things that were dangerous to our ancestors; and, perhaps most interestingly, "cell assemblies" of spontaneously firing neurons that result from Hebbian learning (conditioning), which, again, may be strengthened merely with stress.

A few questions I have about the readings:
-To what extent is the medial prefrontal cortex different in people with anxiety disorders? In addition to its mediation of extinction, the PFC is involved in decision making and higher thinking. Are there any drugs that improve this structure’s performance?
-What is known about the learning/performance distinction that McGaugh avoids talking about? Damasio’s patient Elliot, who had PFC damage, seemed to lack behavioral but not cognitive knowledge.
-McGaugh notes that it is unlikely that animals explicitly rehearse training experience. But don’t their hippocampal abilities indicate that they can?
-Labar & Cabeza article differentiates between encoding and consolidation. What is the difference between the two?
-I’m sure it differs on an individual basis, but are there any neural markers that predict stress-induced hipoocampal failure?

emotional remembering

All of the readings for this week seemed to focus on the formation and recall of emotional memories. We have examined how basic memories are formed, but these readings focused on particularly intense or traumatic situations. There were moments when I felt like a lot of my questions about memory were being answered in fantastic ways and other moments when I was absolutely confused and didn’t want to be. For example, McGaugh’s section “Nothing like a little stress” (McGaugh, 97) covered a lot about the relationship between norepinephrine, epinephrine and the amygdala. The primary discussion revolved around how the releasing of stress hormones increases the intensity of a memory. There was a lot about the exact process that I would like to know about, but I’m still pretty confused after reading it over several times. I understand the implications of stress hormones on the intensity of memory that he discussed during those few pages, and I’m just lost as to the exact process of how that occurs.

On this same issue, LeDoux points out that slight stress can enhance a memory, due to the release of adrenaline. He attributes this to the increasing activity of the amygdala under stress. On the contrary, the hippocampus falters under stress, which explains memory loss in exceptionally intense situations. He continues his discussion noting, “If indeed the hippocampus is impaired and the amygdala facilitated by stress, it would suggest the possibility that stress shifts us into a mode of operation in which we react to danger rather than think about it.” (LeDoux, 247) This reminded me of last week’s reading, which discussed how when a person is confronted with a threatening situation, their body reacts to the threat before processing what is going on and how to respond to it. I wondered if this fact that “stress shifts us into a mode of operation” would be related to the fact that the amygdala processes innate danger through implicit memory and the hippocampus responds more practically (as in deciding a course of action) as through explicit memory.

The accuracy of our memories was another theme that interested me, as when McGaugh discussed “creative remembering.” (McGaugh, 115) We began addressing this last week in class, through a discussion about how memories can become skewed upon trying to recall them. It is a natural effect, because our new experiences will inevitably affect how we remember old events. I definitely think it’s interesting that the context in which we recall something affects how we think something occurred. It is tempting to think of memories as “imprints” of past experiences and to think that there are certain events that will always stay with you exactly as they occurred. Memory is certainly more deceptive than I realized before beginning all this research.

response for week 8

In chapter five of McGaugh we are presented with a greater articulation of the concept of “flashbulb memory” developed by Roger Brown and James Kulik. Flashbulb memory, as the word “flashbulb” would seem to suggest, is not photographic and does not provide accurate or complete memories necessarily. Flashbulb memory seems to be an umbrella term for strong, semantic memories that stem from an intense emotional experience, one that can be referred to in a more or less concise way. They are vivid and clear in the sense that whatever happened to structure these memories contained intense emotional content. This idea seems to be the most significant in the relationship between memory and emotion throughout our readings for this week because, as most of the data presented in LeDoux, McGaugh and the LaBar and Cabeza article suggests, the process to determine what we remember, how we remember it, and what physically and psychologically happens in the event and the progression following it, is tied to an emotional arousal occurring during or after a significant experience.
I found McGaugh’s study of the use of drugs on this effect to be very interesting and simultaneously confusing. He studied the use of stimulants, adrenalin boosters, and beta-blockers in lab rats to determine if said drugs affected the memory process. What he found was that the stimulants did increase the ability to learn and memorize and that the beta-blockers had the opposite effect. Further in his research, he also found a direct relation to the use of these drugs in the amygdala and the hippocampus supporting his claim that the emotional impact on memory is also significant. McGaugh also suggested that applying this data to humans would prove effective, i.e. giving beta-blockers to patients admitted into the ER after experiencing a traumatic event (like a car crash) might suppress, to some extent, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because the process of remembering would be stifled. While this is an interesting claim, I couldn’t help but think about the previous distinction of memory versus learning/performance. We haven’t yet begun to figure out the complexity of what exactly makes up a memory (in humans or animals) therefore the exaggeration or repression of them (within a specific episode) seems unlikely at this point and time. It seems kind of obvious to me that stress hormones would increase an awareness of an event that would lead to a more detailed memory, but how would this process turn out in a study of long term memory? More significantly, how would this process relate to flashbulb memory in a study where participants had to be administered the drug immediately after experiencing a significantly stressful event? How would you calculate this?
Another point that I found interesting in the readings was McGaugh’s reference to remembering as a “creative act” (p. 115). How we remember and what we remember ties to our creative processes because of our nature, as humans, to be storytellers. This kind of relates to our discussion last week of mnemonics, yet the inherent process to develop stories and believe them as truths is interesting in relation to our discussion of integrated/non-integrated memory. I often find that certain memories I feel that I had were really memories of my sister’s, who, being a great storyteller, would present her experiences in such a vivid way that I would visualize them and interpret them as my own at a very early age. This is similar to Sir Frederic Bartlett’s idea that we sometimes include coherence in our narrative tellings of events in sacrifice of accuracy. It also ties to the study we read about in McGaugh to convince children that they got lost in a supermarket and consequently provide them with a false memory.
Another idea that is not necessarily related to this, but I found interesting seeing that its kind of similar to gestalt psychology, is LaBar and Cabeza’s use of the term “central gist” in describing emotionally arousing experiences. By this I think they mean the general emotional content of a remembered experience as opposed to specific details. I would really like to see this point developed more in understanding how we might fuse emotional memories, or construct details out of a “central gist” as opposed to the actual details in an event.