Cognition and Emotion Essay - Separate or Interact? PDF

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Cognition and Emotion Essay - Separate or Interact? Grade 65...

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Cognition and emotion: separate or interactive?

Cognition and emotion: separate or interactive? University of Kent

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Debate of the underlying relationship between cognition and emotion originates to 2,000 years ago, when Aristotle emphasised that cognition is an integral part of emotion (Lazarus, 1999). More recently in the past two centuries, this area has fascinated cognitive psychologists, who have conducted a substantial amount of research on whether cognition and emotion are separate systems or interact together. Cognition is considered to involve sophisticated functions in the brain, involving processes such as attention, problem solving, reasoning, memory, decision making and evaluation (Pessoa, 2008). Although emotion is less easy to define, most psychologists agree that emotion is any relatively brief conscious experience that is distinguished by intense mental activity and high levels of pleasure or displeasure (Cabanac, 2002). Evidence for the notion that emotion is separate to cognition exists and much of this particularly focus on the role of separate brain regions on separate emotions . Additionally, contrasting research suggests that cognition and emotion interact together, such as the network theory, emotion regulation and further research on brain regions which argue that cognition and emotion in fact do not work separately in theses areas. This essay will discuss the contrasting research for the separate versus interactive debate and will then conclude if cognition and emotion are processes that work completely separately or that they play an interactive role in the brain. Research in affective neuroscience, the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion, suggests that emotion is directly related to the limbic system. Several researchers believe that there are different emotion components that experience particular emotions more than other components; one example is the amygdala and fear. Patient SM contributes supporting evidence towards this concept (Feinstein, Aldophs, Damasio & Tranel, 2011), who has bilateral amygdala damage and is unable to experience the emotion of fear. Feinstein et al. exposed a variety of fear-inducing stimuli to SM, however the patient repeatedly demonstrated an absence of fear to these stimuli. Despite this, SM has the ability to

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experience and exhibit alternative emotions. It was additionally found that SM could provide correct facts about the fear-inducing stimuli (Bechara et al.,1995), who was compared to a patient with hippocampus damage and could not report the correct facts about the stimuli. This suggests that damage to the amygdala does not influence the processing of fear-inducing stimuli, but primarily mediates the emotion of fear, which can further indicate that different brain regions work separately to control over different emotions. This case study is supported by empirical experiments, one example from Blanchard and Blanchard (1972) showed that rats with lesioned amygdalae demonstrated reduced fear responses in their autonomic and motor behaviour. This highlights the role of a route that engages between the amygdala and fear. However, a vast proportion of research on the amygdala is conducted on animal subjects due to ethics behind lesioning human amygdalae (Storbeck & Clore, 2008) and this questions whether findings, such as those from Blanchard and Blanchard, can be generalised to the human amygdala. This is particularly important, because human brain regions are often not as simplistic as the brain regions of some species (Premack, 1997). Nonetheless, it is clear the amygdala is a crucial region in relation to the emotion of fear, suggesting cognition and emotion are perhaps structurally separate. The insula is believed to be the predominant brain region involved in experiencing emotion of disgust (Wicker et al., 2003). Large quantities of research have consistently found that lesions of the anterior insula result in deficits in feelings of disgust and also the recognition of others’ facial expressions of disgust (Adolphs, Tranel & Damasio, 2003; Calder, Keane, Manes, Antoun and Young, 2000). The aforementioned research was conducted on patients with insula damage, however further research surrounding this brain have been conducted on neurologically healthy individuals. Stark et al. (2007) used fMRI to measure insula activity on participants, whilst presenting them with a variety of pictures and asking them to rate each one on disgust and fear. Activation in the insula was found to be

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significantly correlated with their ratings of disgust, compared to both ratings of fear and disgust which alternatively resulted in activation in the occipital and pre-frontal cortices and amygdala. This supports the outlook that the insula has its own specific role in the processing of disgust. However, a meta-analysis of 55 studies from Phan, Wager, Taylor and Liberzon (2002) found that studies which included emotional tasks resulted in cognitive demand that was involved in the activation of the insula, highlighting the view that cognition and emotion may interact within the insula. The lateral pre-frontal cortex (LPFC) is one brain region where cognition and emotion are believed to interact together. Gray, Braver and Raichle (2002) conducted an fMRI study, where they measured the pre-frontal activity of participants who watched short videos that intended to induce emotion and who then completed working memory tasks. The findings found that bilateral LPFC activity reflected both components from the emotion task and working memory task equally. An important observation was that the overall activity in this brain region was not predictable if the researchers just looked at components from the emotion task or working memory task in isolation. This outcome suggests that cognition and emotion have a crossover interaction and neural activity in the LPFC depends on both cognition and emotion. A strength of Gray et al.’s study is that it induced different types of emotional states; positive, negative and neural. This suggests that multiple types of emotions interact with cognition in the LPFC. However, future research should focus on particular emotions, to gain more specific conclusions. Furthermore, evidence from Goldstein et al. (2007) found that response inhibition, a cognitive process used to cancel an intended action, during a no-go task was found to interact with emotion in the LPFC. fMRI activity displayed that response inhibition following negative words engaged the LPFC, despite that this region is not recruited by negative or inhibitory task demands. These studies produce clear evidence that cognition and both positive and negative emotions interact together in the LPFC.

Cognition and emotion: separate or interactive? Although the previous research discussed clearly states that the amygdala is central to the processing of fear, it has more recently been thought that this brain region is used for cognition and therefore this aids the argument that cognition and emotion are not separate. Barrett (2006) suggested there are not brain regions that are dedicated to specific emotions, but there are specific areas which are critically involved in emotion processing. For example, if this accurate, the amygdala is involved in the emotion of fear, but it is not specifically associated with fear. Barrett’s belief that brain regions have additional purposes to emotion is supported by findings that the amygdala is involved in the role of memory. It is known that the more emotional impact a memory has, the more vividly it can be recalled (Kensinger, 2009). Cahill, Babinksy, Markowitsch and McGaugh (1995) found that patient BP, who had amygdala damage, did not display this typical enhanced memory for emotional details of a story, compared to non-emotional details. This consequently demonstrates that damage to the amygdala can lead to impaired memory. Subsequent PET studies support this, for example Cahill et al. (1996) found that activity during encoding in the right amygdala successfully predicted the recall of negative emotional stimuli up to several weeks later, which also validates that cognition occurs in the amygdala. Although the amygdala has a large effect on the role of emotion, cognition nonetheless follows and it can therefore be concluded that cogntion and emotion are interactive in this brain region. The network theory, as proposed by Bower (1981), puts forward a semantic network which explains how emotion has an influence on cognition. Bower suggested that emotions are units or nodes stored in a network which has multiple connections to ideas, events, physiological systems and behaviours. This assumption, related to the mood-state-dependent memory (MSDM) hypothesis, which states that memory is best when the emotions experienced during learning are the same during retrieval (Walz & Rapee, 2003). If this hypothesis is correct, then this provides supporting evidence towards cognition and emotion

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working together. Ucros (1989) conducted a meta-analysis of 40 studies which investigated the MSDM hypothesis and found that the predisposition for individuals to remember information better when there was a match between the emotion experienced during learning and retrieval was moderate. However, stronger effects often occurred when participants were in a positive mood, rather than a negative mood. Despite this support being fairly weak for the MSDM hypothesis and therefore the network theory, Ucros’ meta-analysis nonetheless highlights that cognition and emotion do interact with one other, whether or not this specific hypothesis and theory is completely accurate or not. Further research on Bower (1981)’s network theory has been conducted in the testing of mood congruity; the finding that processing information is easier when there is agreement between an individual’s current emotion and affective value of the information (Perrig, 1988). Bower, Gilligan and Monteiro (1981) tested mood congruity by assigning participants to either read a positive story about a character who is happy with their life or read a sad story about a different character who is depressed. Their findings found that participants identified better with the character who was experiencing the emotion which best resembled their own and that they were able to recall more information about that character, which is therefore in support of the network theory and that cognition and emotion are interactive. Likewise to the MDSM hypothesis, evidence for the effect of mood congruity is found to be more robust with positive emotions than negative emotions. Therefore, it can perhaps be perceived that cognition and emotion play a more interactive role when the emotion is positive. Supporting evidence for this notion was obtained from Rusting and DeHart (2000), who found participants who were induced into a negative mood and following this, were asked to either focus on these negative emotions, engage in positive reappraisal or given freedom to decide on their thoughts. Mood congruity effects were found to be stronger with participants in the positive reappraisal condition. Due to positive reappraisal being a cognitive process that

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requires individuals to consciously choose the direction of their emotions, it can consequently be suggested that cognition and emotion interact in relation to mood congruity and therefore do not work separately. Moreover, the network theory predicts that both depression and anxiety result from a variety of cognitive biases, which therefore proposes that cognition and the emotions related to these mental illnesses interact. One cognitive bias is attentional bias; Bar-Haim, Lamy, Perganini, Bakermans-Kranenberg and van IJzendoorn (2007) conducted a meta-analysis on studies of attentional bias in individuals who were suffering from anxiety. Clear evidence of attentional bias was found with subliminal stimuli, stimuli that is presented below conscious awareness, and supraliminal stimuli, stimuli that is presented above conscious awareness. Additionally, the magnitude of attentional bias was similar across all anxiety disorders and also individuals who displayed high levels of trait anxiety, demonstrating its reliability amongst mild to severe types of anxiety. Bar-haim et al. concluded that this bias in the experience of the emotion of anxiety is a consequence of several cognitive processes, for instance pre-attentive, attentional and post-attentive processes. A specific piece of supporting evidence for attentional bias from Rinck and Becker (2007) found that individuals with a fear of spiders were significantly more likely to visually fix their eyes first on a picture of a spider, when simultaneously presented with three other pictures of different stimuli, rather than individuals who did not have a fear of spiders. However, little research has been conducted on the effects of experiencing the emotion of depression on attentional bias (Donaldson, Lam & Mathews, 2007). Therefore, this undermines the reliability of attentional bias, because it is unknown how accurate this bias is when in relation to depression. Despite this, cognitive biases regardless provide evidence that cognition and emotion work together through interaction. Emotional regulation is referred to how the control for cognitive processes can impact

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emotions (Blair, Denham, Kochanoff & Whipple, 2004). One example where emotional regulation is taught to be successfully used is in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which is based on the idea that cognition, emotion and behaviour interact together. Research surrounding this therapy puts forward the idea that cognition determines emotion, suggesting these processes interact together (Segal, Lau & Rokke, 1999). In CBT, patients learn how to control their emotions by distracting themselves from negative circumstances (Beck, 2011) and it has been found that this evaluation of a situation does successfully affect emotional responses (Ochsner, Silver & Buhle, 2012). Due to the outcomes from CBT, this demonstrates that cognition and emotion must work together in the brain to produce results involving the cognitive process of regulating emotions. However, research has yet to demonstrate how exactly cognition and emotion interacts in situations like this. Okon-Singer, Handler, Pessoa and Hackman (2015) argue that it is difficult to understand the interaction between these processes and that they are often context-dependent. However, it can still be concluded that cognition and emotion interact through a complex web of connections. In conclusion, it is evident that research in affective neuroscience has demonstrated that different brain regions are critically involved in the processing of certain emotions. For instance, the amygdala has been found to be crucial in the emotion of fear and the insula has an important role in the emotion of disgust. However, as Barrett (2006) argued, it can be thought that these brain regions are not simply dedicated to one specific emotion. Due to this, cognition and emotion are not separate processes. Empirical evidence has demonstrated that the amygdala is involved in other cognitive brain functions, for example memory. Moreover, the LPFC is one brain region which has explicitly shown that cognition and emotion are interactive of one another. Additional research on the network theory, particularly focusing on the MDSM hypothesis, mood congruity and attentional bias, and emotional regulation also presents varied findings that cognition and emotion are integrated. Although some of this

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research is slightly weak and not reliably supported in its entirety, it can still be concluded that cognition and emotion interact together. Further research should specifically address how these processes interact with each other in the brain to reach a more solid conclusion. Overall, it can be concluded there is little doubt in the fact that cognition and emotion are two processes that play an interactive role in the brain.

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Okon-Singer, H., Hendler, T., Pessoa, L., & Shackman, A. J. (2015). The neurobiology of e...