Emotion Basics

Deep History Notes

William James (behaviorist) proposed we do not run from a bear because we are afraid, we are afraid because we run. Responding to danger generates physiological signals that are interpreted as fear. By 1960s the behaviorists’ influence on psychology began to wane, and a new interest in emotions as mental states arose in parallel with the cognitive revolution. Emotion like fear is the result of the interpretation that one is in danger.

The author appears sick of these silly people. Using the amygdala as an example. When threats are presented subliminally to human participants, the subject’s heart beats faster, palms sweat, and muscles tense, but he’s not aware of the stimulus and doesn’t report fear. Someone with amygdala damage can report feeling fear, despite not being able to generate bodily responses. Meaning the amygdala contributes to detection and initiation of response to danger nonconsciously, but is not directly responsible for the conscious feeling of fear. It does help to create activation feedback to the brain, helping to focus attention and amplify experience. Similar circuits to areas that control behaviors related to feeding, fluid balance, thermoregulation, reproduction, and other life-sustaining activities. Not the source but contribute to experiences.

The question about whether animals experience emotion becomes conflated with the question of whether innate behaviors are the way to measure emotions. Behavior does not represent internal experience.

Recent trends in basic emotions include approaches in which affect programs continue to contribute to emotion but in a less restrictive way. James Coan treats emotions not as subjective experiences, but as emergent states that include amygdala activity, feedback from behavioral and physiological responses, and subjective experience. The author disagrees with the subjective part being an element and says the subjective experience – feeling – is the emotion. Cognitive evaluations of situations that affect personal wellbeing. They thus require complex cognitive processes and self-awareness.

Scientists have been sloppy with the words for emotions. Fear, for example, describes the feeling of fear, physical responses of fear, motivation to perform avoidance behavior, cognitive appraisals, etc. Scientists typically approach their work from their personal vantage point, based on intuitions about some phenomena they are interested in understanding. Even though all scientists know that correlation does not equal causation, some things seem so obvious that a casual connection is simply presumed, and becomes a scientific truism, a fact, a dogma, and goes unquestioned.

Confirmation bias affects scientists too. For example, the amygdala is assumed to be the fear center. The connection was made in the 1950s, but the idea began to heat up as a result of research done by Bruce Kapp, Michael Davis, and the author, using Pavlovian fear conditioning in the 1980s. They found the amygdala was an essential part of the brain circuitry that controls behavioral and physiological responses elicited by the conditioned threat. Since they were studying “fear” conditioning, the idea naturally arose that a state of fear was what got conditioned, and that the amygdala is thus a fear center. It was responsible for the so-called fear response, not the generation of the conscious feeling of fear.

As a scientist it is extremely important to be careful of your wording and to predict potential pattern-completion in the media or hyperbole.

To avoid confusion when talking about aversion and resource allocation, behaviors like fear should be replaced with survival behaviors, and the circuits labelled survival circuits. The circuits that control hardwired (instinctive) behaviors. This isolates the objective function from the presumed mental state (feelings).

It has long been assumed that when a medication alters defensive behaviors in animals it is because it changes the fear or anxiety circuits. This effort has been so unsuccessful at reducing fear and anxiety circuits in humans that pharmaceutical companies have ceased searching for new treatments.

To the author, human emotions are autonoetic conscious experiences that are cognitively assembled, much like any other autonoetic conscious experience. The idea of unconscious emotion is an oxymoron: If you don’t feel it, it’s not a feeling, not an emotion. Nevertheless, nonconscious factors contribute. Emotions are a type of constructed schema. Without the self being part of the experience, the experience is not an emotional one. Although, not every experience that involves the self is an emotional one. The noetic awareness that danger is present is not the same as a state of autonoetic awareness in which you know that you are the one in danger.

Barrett describes emotions as conceptual acts. Gerald Clore and Andrew Ortony note that emotion schema are “ready made frames” that we use to interpret the present, remember the past, and anticipate the future.

We experience our various emotions differently because each involves a particular schema that contextualizes and interprets the present state differently. Because schema are built up by the accumulation of memories, the earliest emotions one experiences as a child are simpler than the ones that are experienced later. Through assimilation of additional information, a particular emotion schema becomes more complex, and when new information is contradictory, the schema is modified. Thereby, new experiences result in more specific definitions of emotion. Language may not be necessary for experience but it helps to differentiate them.

If emotions are subjective, why do they seem so universal? What is universal about fear, for example, is not the details, but rather the concept of fear. All organisms face physiological and/or psychological threat. These are among the most significant stimuli they will encounter in life. If the organism has a language, they will give a term to the stimuli they feel when confronted with threat.

A common criticism is that babies put their emotions on display, despite the fact they cannot speak. But they are not unambiguous indicators of feelings because as we’ve seen, responses and feelings are controlled by different circuits in adults, and the circuits that control response mature earlier than the conscious experience ones.

The closest we ever get to the truth of an experience is during it. All recollection afterwards is top-down and can be changed by the very act of trying to retrieve it. Self-narrative revision. They get edited, embellished, and assimilated with other categories available. Writing exposure therapy (WET) gets the person to write about their trauma and modify and clarify the narrative. It seems to have a faster effect than cognitive behavioral therapy and medications.

The multistate hierarchal model is the conscious experience of emotion resulting from the higher-order representation of nonconscious lower-order states by the higher-order network (dorsal and ventral lateral PFC and frontal pole). Key to the experience of perception, memory, and emotions.

In the case of seeing a snake at your feet: image from eyes to visual cortex, secondary visual circuits (some using memory of past perceptions to filter signal) distribute their output to PF areas (especially dorsal and ventral lateral PFC). Secondary sensory circuits also send outputs to circuits that add additional semantic and conceptual meaning to the representations (including medial temporal lobe and neocortical areas, such as the temporal pole, among other multimodal regions). These latter circuits send their outputs to the medial/insula PF areas, which connect with the higher-order network; some also connect directly with the higher order network. On the basis of the various prefrontal representations by the higher-order network, top-down control over processing is initiated and influences ongoing posterior perceptual, mnemonic, and conceptual processing. As these processes unfold, interactions within the higher-order network begin to shape a perceptual conscious experience of the threatening stimulus and its context. At this point you have achieved a noetic state of consciousness – an awareness that harm is present – but are not autonoetically conscious emotional state – one in which you are aware that you are in the presence of harm. This gives high level deliberative cognitive control over instrumental behavior.

By way of sensory inputs from thalamic sensory areas and secondary cortical sensory areas (so-called low and high roads to the amygdala), threats activate the defensive survival circuitry, and initiate a cascade of events in the brain and body. TLDR: amygdala influences top-down conceptual control over sensory processing, memory retrieval, and decision making, as well as higher-order construction of emotions. Also raises arousal – vigilant scanning for clues about the cause, with semantic memories focusing. Insula cortex retrieves messages from amygdala and connects to the medial prefrontal areas then to higher order prefrontal network. Adrenaline from adrenal medulla activates nerves in body cavity that sends signals to neuromodulatory systems in the brain, further enhancing brain arousal. Cortisol also travels to the brain (slow hormone effect).

To summarize, conscious emotional experience results from the processing of various nonconscious, lower-order ingredients by the PF higher-order network

1) perceptual information about the triggering event

2) retrieved semantic and episodic memories

3) conceptual memories that add additional layers of meaning

4) self-information via self-schema activation

5) survival circuit information

6) brain arousal and body feedback consequences of survival circuit activation

7) information about what kind of emotional situation might be unfolding as a result of activation of one’s personal emotion schema

The higher-order network attends to, monitors, and controls processing of these nonconscious lower-order signals and uses them to introspectively access, label, and experience the resulting autonoetic conscious emotional state. If your fear schema has been auto-completed by a threat, the experience will fall in the general domain of fear.

It is important to note that once you have conceptualized that you are afraid, this awareness may, in top-down fashion, be a sufficient trigger for initiating the kind of brain and body arousal elicited by certain external threats.

Active inference and predictive coding (Lisa Barrett)