Emotional Learning and Memory

Emotional Learning and Memory

1. Flashbulb memories: Vivid detailed memory of an emotionally laden event. Often negative.

   • You probably remember a lot of mundane info surrounding flashbulb memories.
     • OJ simpson trial: People could remember better if they had a very intense emotional reaction, and it wasn't really dependent on how rehearsed the situation was in their minds

2. Can occur without concious recollection (lady with Korsakoffs getting pricked when she shook her doctors hand. Refused to after that.

   • Amnesics didn't remember descripitions of people as being positive or negative, but when asked to choose the photo of someone they'd like to talk to they would gravitate towards the positively explained ones.

3. Prosopagnosia patients couldn't recognize faces but still had a galvanic skin response to their family members photos. Suggests emotional memory is seperate from cognitive memory

4. Conditioned fear responses can be formed to a paired stimulus. LeDoux had a rat in a chamber where the floor was electric. Tone was presented, then shock. CFR occured to the tone.

   • Can be contextual as well. Rats were afraid of the environment in which they had been shocked
   • Fears are often a result of observation. Monkeys who had moms afraid of snakes would then be afraid of snakes even if they previously had no issues
   • Startle reflex: influenced by the rats emotional state. When relaxed, the magnitude is small, opposite when alert.

5. Positive Emotional Conditioning

   • Conditioned place preference: Light arm of radial maze or dark arm is associated with food. The other is not. The rats will spend considerably more time where the food was given because it has a better emotional connection
   • Second order conditioning: paired a light with the rat approaching the water dispenser. Then gave a lever that would turn a light on but no water, an a lever that would give neither. The rats preferred the one with the light.

6. More likely to remember more provocative stimuli as well. People could remember provocative words and greusome stories more than normal/neutral ones

7. The amygdala is the main brain area of emotion

   • Contains the lateral, central, and the basolateral neuclei.
     • Sensory inputs to lateral from the thalamus . Then goes to central and basolateral nuclei. Outputs: central to the hypothalamus and autonomic system, two others from basolateral and project to cerebral cortex and striatum
       • Cortex projections support concious feelings. Other stream is sent to other memory systems, for hippocampus and striatum. Hippo = cognitive memory
     • inputs come from thalamus (taste, auditory, and internal organs) and cortex (olfactory and association areas)
   • Kluver-Bucy disorder = psychic blindness. Blind to emotion.
   • Urbach-Wiethe: amygdala damage but everything else is fine. Can't tell emotions apart. No fear responses.
   • Lateral amygdala damage still showed autonomic and motor responses to foot shock. Destroying the thalamus or auditory connections alone to the amygdala didn't reduce autonomic responses but eliminating both showed the full effect.
   • Human experiment: Urbach disease, damaged hippocampus, and damaged both. Conditioned with a boat horn to a tone, and to a colour. Normals had skin conductance to US and robust CS+ conditioning. Amygdala damage: normal uncoditioned conductance to horn but failed to have a response to the CS+. Damage to both revealed no change in either.