Review
Lecture notes
Phil/Psych 256
March 11, 1997
Emotions:
Communication theory (Oatley)
Somatic theory (Damasio)
Facial expressions (Ekman)
Relationship to CRUM
Q: What are emotions?
1. "Basic" emotions - happiness, sadness, anger, fear,
disgust, surprise(?)
2. Moods - glee, depression, contempt
3. Temperaments, traits, attitudes - phlegmatic,
sanguine, melancholic, ditzy...
(Globe & Mail, 13 Feb. 97)
A. Richardson Goodlatte, 57, who died last
month in New York. He joined the city's Transit
Authority as chief mechanical officer in 1984.
Personally, he couldn't turn a wrench. At the time,
New York subway cars were filthy, smelly, covered
with graffiti and prone to breakdowns. The
bearded, cheerful motivator launched a program
where cleaning crews stood by at terminals to
remove the graffiti from each car as it arrived. If
the job was too big to handle, the entire train was
taken out of service. This caused delays and
inconvenience, but eventually proved Mr.
Goodlatte's theory that people who defaced the
trains would get discouraged if they never saw the
results of their work. In 1989, the entire system was
declared graffiti-free.
Q: What are the contents of an emotion?
1. "Phenomenological tone" (feeling)
2. Action readiness, based on an evaluation of
current goals (Oatley):
i. Happiness: subgoals being achieved
ii. Sadness: failure of plan or loss of goal
iii. Fear: self-preservation goal threatened
iv. Anger: Current plan frustrated
v. Disgust: Gustatory goal violated
3. Conscious preoccupation: compulsive attention to
thoughts, e.g., revenge!
4. Bodily disturbance: nervous and physiological
processes, e.g., "hot under the collar," feeling "pale"
5. Expressions: facial gestures
Q: How do emotions affect cognition?
Communication theory: emotions "tell" you how you are
doing
1. Evaluations of current goals
2. Control signals: nonsemantic "sirens" attached to
basic emotions
3. Semantic messages: attitude towards something, e.g.,
disdain for lawyers
4. Valency: positive and negative emotions, fixed
or variable?
5. Engagement: commitment to goals
6. Prototypes: basic emotions serve as prototypes
(metaphors?) for attitudes, e.g., disgust --> contempt
7. Gestures communicate emotions to others
Q: How are emotions and facial expressions related?
1. Facial expressions for basic emotions are
"pancultural" (Ekman)
2. Physiological associations:
3. "Display rules" govern expression in social
situations
4. Voluntary and involuntary expressions use different
neural resources, dissociated
Q: What is the role of the brain in emotion?
1. Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal region
impairs emotions (Damasio)
2. Severs the connection between the amygdala
("emotional computer") and frontal cortex
3. Some lesion patients, e.g., Gage, Elliot
- left with normal, rational abilities, unimpaired
memories
- capricious, mercurial in decision-making and
planning
- unable to maintain social relationships
- reason correctly about emotions but are disengaged
from them
Somatic-Marker hypothesis (Damasio):
1. Amygdala tracks somatic states as images
("body loop")
2. Frontal cortex models somatic images for purposes
of reasoning ("as-if loop")
3. Somatic images are attached to mark goals, provide
emotional content
4. Hunches, gambling experiment
Can CRUM handle emotions?
A1. Expand:
- add emotion nodes to connectionist networks,
e.g., HAPPY, SAD
- permit empathy - analogical inference on emotional
images
A2: Supplement CRUM by putting cognitive agents in bodies,
e.g., robots
Thursday: Consciousness!
Phil/Psych 256
March 13, 1997
Consciousness:
Phenomenology
Neurology
Functionality
Relationship to CRUM
Q: How do you know that you have a mind?
A1: I don't know. (Interesting...)
A2: I'm aware of things.
A3: I know what it's like to be me.
Q: What things are you aware of?
A1: Sensations - sights, sounds, smells... (images)
A2: Mental states - beliefs, ideas, emotions, moods...
A3: Intentions - goals, plans, memories...
Q: Can these items be disconnected?
A1: Mental states and intentions can be dissociated,
e.g., NN (Tulving)
A2: Sensations and mental states can be dissociated
also, e.g., blindsight (Weiskranz)
A3: Mental states can be removed, e.g., Brother
John (Lecours & Joanette)
Q: What about self-concepts?
A1. Consciousness is associated with a unique persona
A2. But there is MPD
APPLETON, Wis. (Feb 12, 1997 6:36 p.m. EST) -
A former nurse testified that her psychiatrist
hypnotized her and told her she was harboring
120 different personalities -- then billed her
insurance company for the cost of group
therapy.
In the malpractice suit, former nurse's
assistant Nadean Cool, 44, charged Dr. Kenneth
Olson told her at one point that one of the
personalities was Satan and performed an
amateur exorcism on her at the hospital where
the two worked in 1989.
A3. Monkey-mirror experiments (Gallup)
- humans, chimps and orangutans
Q: How are consciousness and the brain associated?
A1. Consciousness is sensitive to sleep/wake cycles
A2. Awareness may be associated with synchronous neural
firing patterns, e.g., 35 to 75 Hertz in the visual
cortex (Crick)
A3. Waterfall illusion
Q: Does CRUM deal adequately with consciousness?
A1. Yes, by ignoring it - it isn't important (Dennett)
A2. No, but it doesn't matter - a[human] brain is
required (Penrose, Searle)
A3. No, CRUM must be expanded to include conscious states
(Johnson-Laird)
- insert a self-concept?
A4. Maybe, CRUM must be supplemented with knowledge
from neuroscience (Churchland,Crick, Edelman)
- sleep/wake training regime for neural networks
(Hinton)
Remarking essays:
1. On a separate sheet of paper...
2. For each question to be remarked, write down your
reason for the request, e.g.,
- a good reason: My answer had all the points of
the model answer, but I only got one mark
- a bad reason: What I meant was...
3. Attach the sheet to the original essay (paper clip, staple)
4. Hand it in to me, by March 18, please
Next week:
- physical environments (Mackworth)
- social environments (Durfee)
Further materials
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