An Introduction to Cognitive Psychology: Processes and Disorders, 3rd Edition

Chapter 12

Summary

  • Anxiety leads to attentional narrowing whereas a sad mood leads to attentional broadening. These effects of mood on attention partly explain why memory for peripheral information is greater in a sad mood than an anxious one.
  • Mood-congruent memory is greater in positive moods than in negative ones because individuals in a negative mood are motivated to improve their mood state.
  • There is more evidence of mood-state-dependent memory when people have to generate their own retrieval cues.
  • Memories of childhood abuse initially recalled outside therapy are more likely to be genuine than those initially recalled inside therapy. Freud’s notion of repression is an unconvincing explanation of recovered memories.
  • Each of the three negative mood states (anxiety; sadness; anger) has an idiosyncratic pattern of effects on judgment and decision making. These differences reflect the different functions fulfilled by each mood state.
  • Angry and positive moods are associated with heuristic or shallow processing whereas sad mood is associated with analytic processing.
  • Angry, sad, anxious, and positive moods all lead to impaired reasoning performance. The main reason is that all these mood states deplete the resources of the central executive.
  • Personal moral dilemmas produce a serious conflict between emotional and cognitive considerations. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in emotional responsiveness and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in cognitive processing of dilemmas.

 

Glossary

Decision-making This involves making a selection from various options, often in the absence of full information.

Deductive reasoning An approach to reasoning in which conclusions can be judged valid or invalid given that certain statements or premises are assumed to be true.

Easterbrook’s hypothesis The notion that high levels of arousal or anxiety cause a narrowing of attention.

Ecological validity The extent to which findings in psychology (especially those obtained in the laboratory) generalise to the real world.           

Flashbulb memory A subject’s recollection of details of what they were doing at the time of some major news event or dramatic incident.

Judgement This involves an assessment of the likelihood of an event occurring on the basis of incomplete information; it often forms the initial process in decision-making.

Meta-analysis A form of statistical analysis based on combining all the findings in a specific area to obtain an overall picture.

Mood-congruent memory The finding that learning and retrieval are better when the learner’s (or rememberer’s) mood state is the same as (or congruent with) the affective value of the to-be-remembered material.

Mood-state-dependent memory The finding that memory performance is better when the individual’s mood state is the same at learning and retrieval than when it differs.

Optimistic bias An individual’s mistaken belief that he/she is more likely than most other people to experience positive events but less likely to experience negative events.

Recovered memories  Childhood traumatic or threatening memories that are remembered many years after the relevant events or experiences.
Repression Motivated forgetting of traumatic or other very threatening events (e.g. childhood abuse).

Urbach–Wiethe disease A disease in which the amygdala and adjacent areas are destroyed; it leads to the impairment of emotional processing and memory for emotional material.

Weapon focus The finding that eyewitnesses pay so much attention to some crucial aspect of the situation (e.g. a weapon) that they ignore other details.

Reading List

Blanchette, I., & Richards, A. (2010). The influence of affect on higher level   cognition: A review of research on interpretation, judgment, decision making and  reasoning. Cognition & Emotion, 24, 561–595.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02699930903132496

Bower, G. H. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36(2), 129–148.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/36/2/129/

Calvo, M. G., & Avero, P. (2005). Time course of attentional bias to emotional scenes in anxiety: Gaze direction and duration. Cognition & Emotion 19(3). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02699930441000157

Eich, E. (1995). Searching for mood dependent memory. Psychological Science, 6, 67–75.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/6/2/67

Eysenck, M. W., & Keane, M. T. (2010). Cognitive Psychology: A Student’s Handbook (6th ed.). Hove, UK: Psychology Press. Chapter 15 in this textbook covers the effects of cognitive processes on emotion as well as the effects of emotion on cognition.

Eysenck, M.W., MacLeod, C., & Mathews, A. (1987). Cognitive functioning and anxiety. Psychological Research, 49(2–3), 189–195. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00308686

Eysenck, M. W., Payne, S., &Santos, R. (2006). Anxiety and depression: Past, present, and future events. Cognition & Emotion, 20( 2). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02699930500220066

Fox, E. (2008). Emotion Science: Cognitive and Neuroscientific Approaches toUnderstanding Human Emotions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Elaine Fox
discusses effects of emotion on cognition in a comprehensive way, especially in Chapters 6 –8.

Litvak, P. M., Lerner, J. S., Tiedens, L. Z., & Shonk, K. (2010). Fuel in the fire: How anger impacts judgment and decision-making. In M. Potegal, G. Stemmler, & Spielberger, C. (ed.). International Handbook of Anger: Constituent and Concomitant Biological, Psychological, and Social Processes (pp. 287–310). New York: Springer.

Rusting, C. L., & DeHart, T. (2000). Retrieving positive memories to regulate negative mood: Consequences for mood-congruent memory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 737–752.
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&uid=2000-08135-009

Van Dillen, L. F., Heslenfeld, D. J., & Koole, S. L. (2009). Tuning down the emotional brain: An fMRI study of the effects of cognitive load on the processing of affective images. NeuroImage, 45(4), 1212–1219.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811909000664