Emotion influences Cognition

State emotion - what you feel at the moment
Trait emotion - personality characteristics. High trait people will have associated emotional/mood more often
Manifestation vs processing
1. The manifestation refers to the actual feeling of the emotion the "hot" component
2. The cognitive steps taken to process the feeling/emotion The "cold" component
3. These two processes often co-occur
  1. Words and pictorial stimuli often used to study how we process emotional material. However studying cognitive processes is different from studying manifestation
    1. Participants often show a positive bias (recalling more positives than negatives) however clinical depression may lead to a negative bias
      1. When both hot and cold components are present the processing may be influenced by the emotional state
MEMORY
1. Mood congruent memory Mood and material match at encoding
  1. Bower et al propose that we remember more of an event if the emotional content of the memory matches mood at recall e.g. happy people remember happy memories more than sad ones and sad people remember sad memories better than happy ones
    1. Ethical considerations of this study cause concern. People hypnotised to induce happy of sad mood
    2. The phenomenon of MCM is robust and has been used to study relationship between depression and memory
      1. Positive Bias findings in normal individuals suggest that this may be adaptive eg always keeping us looking on the bright side
        Depression tends to cause a negative bias in memory - always looking for the worst
        This may lead to a vicious circle - depression leads to biases for negative memory, which increases depressed mood which leads to depression
        Teasdale suggests that breaking this cycle may stop depression i.e. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) (Segal et al
2. Mood Dependent Memory Mood matches at encoding and retrieval
  1. More controversial
  2. Bower used mood induction based test to investigate memory dependence. Participants moods were artificially induced (Happy/sad) and they were required to recall a word list while in a similar or different mood. When encoding and recall mood matched more words were recalled
    1. Bower suggested a SEMANTIC NETWORK THEORY
      1. Emotions are represented by nodes (in a network) which are connected to words/concepts/memories etc. Nodes are activated by external influences resulting in a ripple effect through what is connected to the node. Nodes may also be inhibited. When nodes are activated above a certain threshold then what is stored in the node becomes available to conscious awareness leading to feeling emotion.
        ie when a word is learnt in a specific mood a link is formed between the word node and the mood node. If a participant is in the same mood the rippling activation from the emotion node will connect with the word node resulting in possible conscious awareness of the word
        Different mood will mean that the nodes are inhibited and therefore word will be harder to recall.
      2. Replication of Bowers study has not always been successful, so MDM not found to be a robust effect.
        Eich and Metcalfe claim that the phenomenon was genuine, however because the method of study was flawed replication was difficult.
    2. Ethical considerations about artificially inducing mood

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Emotion influences Cognition

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	Created by p grant over 10 years ago