Greg Detre
Monday, 19 June, 2000
Prof. Rolls � B&B Emotion
Consciousness
chapter 9 conclusion
Gross �
Psychology � chapter on Emotion
Damasio � somatic
marker hypothesis, emotion/reason
Rolls �
flexibility of sensorimotor interface
Daniel
Goleman � Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
The
Philosophers� Magazine - Emotions - Paul Harkin
The Role of
the Amygdala in Fear and Panic - Doug Holt
The Role of
Emotion � random abstract
The reason that
both emotion and motivation are treated is that both involve rewards and
punishments as the fundamental solution of the brain for interfacing sensory
systems to action selection and execution systems.
Computing the
reward and punishment value of sensory stimuli and then using selection between
different rewards and avoidance of punishments in a common reward-based
currency appears to be the general solution that brains use to produce
appropriate behavior
Computing the
reward and punishment value of sensory stimuli and then using selection between
different rewards and avoidance of punishments in a common reward-based
currency appears to be the general solution that brains use to produce
appropriate behavior
it feels like something to be an organism/machine that can think about its own (linguistic + semantically-based) thoughts
qualia, raw sensory + emotional processing feels like something c\os it would be unparsimonious for it to enter the planning, higher-order thought system and not feel like something
the adaptive value of having sensory + emotional feelings (qualia):
such inputs are important to the long-term planning, explicit, processing system
raw sensory feels, and subjective states associated with emotional + motivational states, may not necessarily arise first in evolution
Anyone can become angry---that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way---this is not easy. - Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
self-restraint + compassion/empathy
zeal and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself
"In humans the amygdala...is an almond-shaped cluster of interconnected structures perched above the brainstem, near the bottom of the limbic ring. There are two amygdalas, one on each side of the brain, nestled toward the side of the head...the amygdala is the specialist for emotional matters. If the amygdala is severed from the rest of the brain, the result is a striking inability to gauge the emotional significance of events; this condition is sometimes called 'affective blindness'"
The factual and �feeling� components of this memory may seem inseparable, but in reality, they come from two distinct areas of the brain, said Joseph LeDoux, PhD, professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University. The �facts� are stored in the brain�s cortex along with other concrete memories. The memories of the feelings�the heart beating, the sweating�is stored in the amygdala, deep in the brain�s center. This is the part of the memory that makes it emotional; it�s the true emotional memory, said LeDoux.
Emotions consist of a conscious experience as well as physiological and neurological reactions and voluntary and involuntary behaviors
use primal (simple) emotions � easy to define + measure, e.g. fear
especially the connection between memory + fear, e.g. car crash
most research on memory-emotion links is on rats in a classical fear conditioning paradigm:
pairing a tone/flashing light with a mild electrical foot shock
after conditioning, the animals react to the sound/light as if to a threatening situation (they freeze, blood pressure rises, heart rate increases)
this response dies out only after many presentations of the sound/light without the shock
nearly every animal group studied becomes physiologically aroused when facing a threatening stimulus and gets conditioned in this way
the underlying neurological pathways are likely to be similar for all mammalian species
assumption: the brain somehow pairs the tone + shock in memory, so that the tone alone = a harbinger of threat, triggering the fear response (activates the autonomic NS, and the sensorimotor system)
wanted to find out where the brain stores the emotional memory which pairs the tone/shock. made small lesions in different areas to try to derail the conditioning response:
auditory cortex (highest level at which the brain processes sound) � but the rats still learned to fear the tone when damaged
auditory thalamus (provides most auditory inputs to the cortex) � when damaged, eliminated rats� susceptibility to fear conditioning � it also transmits to the amygdala
amygdala � wiped out fear conditioning in the rats, or various specific aspects of the fear response (e.g. the rise in blood pressure, limited ability to freeze) if lesion specific areas downstream from the amygdala
tried
to characterise the fear response at the level of individual neurons
amygdala receives auditory information from 2 different areas: the auditory thalamus + auditory cortex
the amygdala then processes the signals, and
generates a fear response by stimulating other areas of the brain that control
muscle function, heart rate and blood pressure.
to
examine the signals coming into the amygdala from the thalamus and the cortex,
they recorded electrical activity from single neurons
signals from thalamus: fast + crude general information, reach the amygdala first, immediate response
signals from cortex: slow + refined, detailed stimulus information, allows re-analysis
adaptive: safer to respond quickly to a benign stimulus than to respond slowly to a true threat
phobias,
panic attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder: malfunctions in the brain�s
ability to control fear, when the urge to run is triggered too often
fear response can be extinguished by repeatedly giving the stimulus without being paired by the feared experience (i.e. the conditioning can be extinguished by presenting the CS without the UCS)
but extinguishing the emotional response doesn�t destroy the factual memory of the fear
rats no longer show signs of being under threat when they hear the tone, but the memory in the cortex still responds
damage to rat�s prefrontal cortex: extinction of fear becomes difficult
perhaps phobias �/span> dysfunction in their prefrontal cortex that doesn�t allow them to automatically unlearn a fear once new information is provided.
learning to detect and respond to danger is an evolutionary system. emotional feeling is what humans have evolved by adding consciousness to this basically adaptive, physiological response
emotions � bad press
Plato: divorce between emotion + reason
Russell: the strongest emotions are the destructive ones
but our view of emotions is ambivalent
witness our lack of sympathy for Camus� anti-hero in The Stranger
three claims underlying the negatives of emotion:
it is reason supposedly, not emotion, which brings understanding (c.f. Huckleberry Finn, where his educated emotions are in conflict with the rationally-determined moral right)
this provides an account of what an emotion is (a sort of feeling) and its value (i.e. not much, given what it is)
recently, each of the above three claims has been attacked:
none of the felt or
physiological changes are definitive of anger (experimental evidence shows that we cannot easily
identify our emotional states if this were the only basis for our judgements)
if feelings were the basis of our identification of our emotional states, we would know our emotions by inferential judgements on the basis of the feelings, yet this isn�t how we know � we know from �inside� somehow, without reference to our pumping adrenaline or quickened pulse. there must, therefore, be more to emotions than feelings
we distinguish different emotions by the thoughts they comprise. having a belief (e.g. believing something to be threatening or that something related to you deserves praise) is what makes the emotions of fear or pride. that is not to say that an emotion just is a set of beliefs, but rather that thoughts and beliefs identify and in part constitute emotions, but that other factors such as feelings, dispositions, pain and pleasure and so on, are also necessary. Cognitivism = beliefs are necessary but not sufficient for emotions
emotions can be in/appropriate according to the rationality of the belief(s) they are based on. If we accept this, all three of the claims above must be false. Since emotions are based on beliefs, (1) they are not merely sensations, (2) they can be appropriate, and (3) it is a mistake to characterise the 'rational' and the 'emotional' as mutually exclusive, to think of them as distinct capacities, because they are in fact, intertwined.
this somehow seems to over-emphasise and distort the relation towards the opposite direction of emotion and reason � emotion isn�t simply the hand-maiden of reason via beliefs, since we can have emotions without beliefs too
Damasio concurs: impaired emotional capacities �/span> range of impaired cognitive capacities (e.g. the ability to prioritise, to deliberate, evaluate and make decisions)
what about animals + young children, since we hesitate to attribute beliefs to them
others reject the cognitivist approach altogether, emphasising the central role of feelings
Goleman � emotional education
preoccupied Aristotle (earliest cognitivist)
but if, as cognitivists claim, beliefs are not sufficient for emotion, what else has to be changed in order to educate someone's emotions?
experience is the biological remedy for an inappropriate non-rational emotive response, but when the organism�s biological mechanism is the problem, you need to attack the problem at the level of neuronal connections
but is this education, i.e. does it involve a transformation of understanding?
cognitivism seems, however, to concede that this will not be enough
how then can there be real education of the emotions? relevant to putative philosophical theories
evolution � fear is a neural circuit designed to keep the organism alive in dangerous situations
Todd Braver and Jeremy Gray are collaborating on research involving the effects of emotion on cognitive control function. Gray has hypothesized that approach-related emotions modulate activity in left PFC, and should facilitate processing in tasks that critically rely on left PFC function. Conversely, withdrawal-related emotions are hypothesized to modulate right PFC activity, and should facilitate processing in tasks relying on right PFC function. In a series of studies, Gray has provided behavioral evidence consistent with his hypothesis (using verbal vs. spatial working memory tasks). We are currently beginning a fMRI study which will directly test the predictions of Gray's theory regarding the effects of induced emotion on PFC activiity during verbal vs. nonverbal working memory.