MUST KNOW THIS notes and images for exam 16-01-19 200300074
KEY ITEMS of Cognitive
Neuroscience
Lecture 8a: Emotion
What is emotion?
Emotion prepares you for action (signaling function) as response to threats.
Emotions guide behavior (adaptive responses).
From the evolutionary perspective emotions are responses that are adaptive to survive.
Primary reinforcers that satisfy hunger, thirst, safety.
Relationship between emotion and motivation secondary / learned reinforces
Neurobiology of emotion
Three biosystems in the brain (loosely coupled)
1. Reptilian brain (brainstem / cerebellum): life support system, reflexive behavior
Implicit
2. Paleomammalian (‘limbic system’): motivation / emotion Implicit
3. Neomammalian (neocortex): thought / cognition; higher level control explicit
The emotional brain (= the limbic system) short latency (<1 sec; very fast response) with
direct responses to the brain (increase heartrate etc.)
Neurobiological models for fear – Amygdala (LeDoux)
Sensory stimuli that enter your brain in the thalamus (relay station for all sensory
information)
Information is going to the sensory cortex (high route) and then to the amygdala
o Thorough but slow
Idea LeDoux = low route where information from the thalamus goes directly to the
amygdala
o Quick and dirty (unconscious processing)
Outputs of the amygdala signs of fear of anxiety can be explained by activation of
the amygdala
Inputs from the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) regulate limbic system responses
Emotion areas of prefrontal cortex:
,MUST KNOW THIS notes and images for exam 16-01-19 200300074
Ventral/’subgenual’ subdivision of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) roughly
corresponds to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex
Orbitofrontal cortex (lateral and medial parts) regulates emotion
Experimental manipulation of emotion
Fear conditioning: the form of conditioning where you use a previously neutral stimulus and
you pair this with an aversive stimulus (e.g. shock) light will after a couple times provoke
fear (conditioned stimulus)
Fear Potentiated Startle (FPS): if you startle a human or animal, they will startle more in the
fear condition
Question: human amygdala involved in fear conditioning?
Yes, evidence from fear conditioning response of patients without temporal lobes
(no amygdala) didn’t show a fear response to the conditioned stimulus provoking
fear.
However, they could learn to prepare for a shock (then they would have the
conditioned stimulus response)
“Thus, contrary to earlier findings, robust conditioned SCRs can be obtained in
patients with unilateral temporal lobe resection as long as they are able to acquire
explicit stimulus contingency knowledge.”
Does this really reflect conditioned fear?
o No, it reflects arousal, irrespective of valence
Possible solution: recording of Startle/Eyeblink to actually record fear
Amygdala involved in human conditioned fear-potential startle
Patients can show sweating as a response to a stimulus (if they know when the shock
is coming) but they won’t produce a startle (so, no real reaction to the stimulus –
only response because they ‘should’)
Neuroanatomy of fear conditioning = the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (anterior insula)
consistently activated in response to threat (based on a meta-analysis). However, no
amygdala response based on fMRI data.
This can be explained by:
, MUST KNOW THIS notes and images for exam 16-01-19 200300074
fMRI resolution – amygdala contains different, quite small areas that couldn’t have
been measured quite accurately at the time
fMRI time course – typically modelled as same response to each trial, whereas
conditioning is a learning process that develops over time
Human fear conditioning is only mild threat
Interactions with cognition
Effects of emotion outside of awareness: Emotional Stroop
Task: ‘name color’
Fearful expression interferes (response slower)
Interference in task with masked emotional faces is crucial
‘Pre-attentive’ there is no attention required to activate amygdala
o This further investigated with showing faces and refocusing attention to bars
o On average there was amygdala activation for all faces (happy, fear)
o However, when attention was explicitly directed away there was a way lower
amygdala response
o Possible explanation = only visual input to amygdala is through high route
o No evidence for direct thalamic pathway in primate visual system (no
evidence for low route yet)
Emotion hypotheses
Right-hemisphere hypothesis: right cerebral hemisphere is specialized for mediating
emotions.
Valence hypothesis: left hemisphere is for positive emotion (because it has linguistic
and social functions) and the right hemisphere is for negative emotions (because it is
reactive, and survival related).
Somatic marker hypothesis: somatic markers give rise to anticipation of the
emotional consequences of a decision being made.
Final verdict on evidence for subcortical threat processing (low route)
Evidence that non-attended or unconsciously processed information can activate
amygdala does not necessarily mean that this information has been processed
(exclusively) through subcortical channels
Correlations between thalamic and amygdala activations such as discussed in
binocular rivalry and filtered face stimuli is not conclusive for existence of low route
I guess you could say that there is some neurobiological basis for the low route but
that the evidence is not very strong in that sense there needs to be more research
in this topic, and we cannot yet distinguish a high and low route
Summary
Emotion important driver of behavior. Affects behavioral tendency, attention, memory
etcetera.
Several levels of neural system involved in generating emotional responses; learning
adaptive responses; interactions between emotions and cognitions; responses are regulated
through mutual connectivity
KEY ITEMS of Cognitive
Neuroscience
Lecture 8a: Emotion
What is emotion?
Emotion prepares you for action (signaling function) as response to threats.
Emotions guide behavior (adaptive responses).
From the evolutionary perspective emotions are responses that are adaptive to survive.
Primary reinforcers that satisfy hunger, thirst, safety.
Relationship between emotion and motivation secondary / learned reinforces
Neurobiology of emotion
Three biosystems in the brain (loosely coupled)
1. Reptilian brain (brainstem / cerebellum): life support system, reflexive behavior
Implicit
2. Paleomammalian (‘limbic system’): motivation / emotion Implicit
3. Neomammalian (neocortex): thought / cognition; higher level control explicit
The emotional brain (= the limbic system) short latency (<1 sec; very fast response) with
direct responses to the brain (increase heartrate etc.)
Neurobiological models for fear – Amygdala (LeDoux)
Sensory stimuli that enter your brain in the thalamus (relay station for all sensory
information)
Information is going to the sensory cortex (high route) and then to the amygdala
o Thorough but slow
Idea LeDoux = low route where information from the thalamus goes directly to the
amygdala
o Quick and dirty (unconscious processing)
Outputs of the amygdala signs of fear of anxiety can be explained by activation of
the amygdala
Inputs from the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) regulate limbic system responses
Emotion areas of prefrontal cortex:
,MUST KNOW THIS notes and images for exam 16-01-19 200300074
Ventral/’subgenual’ subdivision of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) roughly
corresponds to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex
Orbitofrontal cortex (lateral and medial parts) regulates emotion
Experimental manipulation of emotion
Fear conditioning: the form of conditioning where you use a previously neutral stimulus and
you pair this with an aversive stimulus (e.g. shock) light will after a couple times provoke
fear (conditioned stimulus)
Fear Potentiated Startle (FPS): if you startle a human or animal, they will startle more in the
fear condition
Question: human amygdala involved in fear conditioning?
Yes, evidence from fear conditioning response of patients without temporal lobes
(no amygdala) didn’t show a fear response to the conditioned stimulus provoking
fear.
However, they could learn to prepare for a shock (then they would have the
conditioned stimulus response)
“Thus, contrary to earlier findings, robust conditioned SCRs can be obtained in
patients with unilateral temporal lobe resection as long as they are able to acquire
explicit stimulus contingency knowledge.”
Does this really reflect conditioned fear?
o No, it reflects arousal, irrespective of valence
Possible solution: recording of Startle/Eyeblink to actually record fear
Amygdala involved in human conditioned fear-potential startle
Patients can show sweating as a response to a stimulus (if they know when the shock
is coming) but they won’t produce a startle (so, no real reaction to the stimulus –
only response because they ‘should’)
Neuroanatomy of fear conditioning = the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (anterior insula)
consistently activated in response to threat (based on a meta-analysis). However, no
amygdala response based on fMRI data.
This can be explained by:
, MUST KNOW THIS notes and images for exam 16-01-19 200300074
fMRI resolution – amygdala contains different, quite small areas that couldn’t have
been measured quite accurately at the time
fMRI time course – typically modelled as same response to each trial, whereas
conditioning is a learning process that develops over time
Human fear conditioning is only mild threat
Interactions with cognition
Effects of emotion outside of awareness: Emotional Stroop
Task: ‘name color’
Fearful expression interferes (response slower)
Interference in task with masked emotional faces is crucial
‘Pre-attentive’ there is no attention required to activate amygdala
o This further investigated with showing faces and refocusing attention to bars
o On average there was amygdala activation for all faces (happy, fear)
o However, when attention was explicitly directed away there was a way lower
amygdala response
o Possible explanation = only visual input to amygdala is through high route
o No evidence for direct thalamic pathway in primate visual system (no
evidence for low route yet)
Emotion hypotheses
Right-hemisphere hypothesis: right cerebral hemisphere is specialized for mediating
emotions.
Valence hypothesis: left hemisphere is for positive emotion (because it has linguistic
and social functions) and the right hemisphere is for negative emotions (because it is
reactive, and survival related).
Somatic marker hypothesis: somatic markers give rise to anticipation of the
emotional consequences of a decision being made.
Final verdict on evidence for subcortical threat processing (low route)
Evidence that non-attended or unconsciously processed information can activate
amygdala does not necessarily mean that this information has been processed
(exclusively) through subcortical channels
Correlations between thalamic and amygdala activations such as discussed in
binocular rivalry and filtered face stimuli is not conclusive for existence of low route
I guess you could say that there is some neurobiological basis for the low route but
that the evidence is not very strong in that sense there needs to be more research
in this topic, and we cannot yet distinguish a high and low route
Summary
Emotion important driver of behavior. Affects behavioral tendency, attention, memory
etcetera.
Several levels of neural system involved in generating emotional responses; learning
adaptive responses; interactions between emotions and cognitions; responses are regulated
through mutual connectivity
