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BE Seminars, Session 2,26/04/2011

Giuseppe A. Veltri

Emotions and SocialCognition

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1Monday, 25 April 2011



Overview

• Part 1 Emotions and Affective Heuristics

• Part 2 Social Cognition

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What are emotions?

• Communication mechanisms that maintainsocial order/structure

• Behavior learned through operant or classicalconditioning, not involving cognitive mediation

• Appraisal of biopsychosocial situation

• Complex physiological response

• Integrated, three-response system construct

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Areas of inquiry

• Effect of emotion on performance (e.g., memory,perception, attention)

• Information processing characteristics of emotionaldisorders (e.g., anxiety, depression)

• Emotion and social learning

• Cognitive neuroscience of emotions

- cognitive structure of emotion

- neuropsychological studies

- cognitive aspects of emotion (e.g., appraisal)

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Affective Heuristics

Affect plays a role in judgment or decision in4 roles:

1. Affect as information

2. Affect as spotlight

3. Affect as a motivator

4. Affect as a ‘common currency’




Emotions and memory

• Distinct, vivid, recollections of shocking events, andassociated personal activities

• Long-lasting? Accurate? Special?

- Brown & Kulick (1977): special encoding mechanism(NOW PRINT!)

- Niesser & Harsh (1992) Challenger study

- Although FM appear to be different subjectively (theyprovide an intersection between personal history and“History”), they are not necessarily more accurate

- Confidence is not equivalent to accuracy

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P. Gage’s case in

Damasio’s stud




Somatic marker theory

• Bodily states play a role in decision-making

and reasoning

• “Somatic markers” link memories of experience (cortex) with feelings (limbic)

• Attempts to account for ‘automatic’ or‘unconscious’ biases




SMT /2

• Somatic marker “biasing signals” areregulated by VM premotor cortex; thesesignals help regulate decision-making inuncertainty

• Support from Iowa Gambling Task;

anticipatory SCR’s to selection of “unfavorable” decks




•Participants are presented with 4 virtualdecks of cards on a computer screen. They

are told that each time they choose a cardthey will win some game money. Every sooften, however, choosing a card causesthem to lose some money.

•The goal of the game is to win as muchmoney as possible. Every card drawn will

earn the participant a reward.Occasionally, a card will also have a penalty.

•Thus, some decks are "bad decks", andother decks are "good decks", becausesome will lead to losses over the long run,and others will lead to gains. The decks

differ from each other in the number of trials over which the losses are distributed




SMT /3

• Most healthy participants sample cards from each deck,and after about 40 or 50 selections are fairly good atsticking to the good decks.

• Patients with orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) dysfunction,however, continue to perseverate with the bad decks,sometimes even though they know that they are losingmoney overall.

• Concurrent measurement of galvanic skin responseshows that healthy participants show a "stress" reactionto hovering over the bad decks after only 10 trials, longbefore conscious sensation that the decks are bad.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_skin_response

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseveration

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitofrontal_cortex











Another example

• Peters, Slovic, Hibbard and Tusler (2006) linkedaffect to the anchoring process of numericalestimation.

- Decision makers asked to estimate the numberof fatalities in US from various causes of death,first anchored on a provided number (theactual number of deaths from a differentdisease) then adjusted based on the extent of their worry about the disease underconsideration




Affect as spotlight

• Selective attention to threat (McLeod)

• Failure to ‘disengage’ attention from threat (Koster,

et al 2004)- Eyewitness’ inability to identify a perpetrator

when a weapon is used in a crime

• Easterbrook hypothesis: narrowing of attentional

focus in emotional situations

• Perceived risks mediated by affect (Alhakami andSlovic, 1994).




Affect and accessibility

• Kahneman argued that the accessibility is adeterminant of what information most

influenced a judgment or choice.

• Verplanken, Hofstee and Janssen (1998)found that participants could make affective

evaluations of brand names and countriesfaster than cognitive evaluations indicatinghigh accessibility.




Affect as motivator

• Lerner, Small and Loewenstein (2004) studied theimpact of experimentally induced emotion states of sadness and disgust on prices set by buyers and

sellers in a real-play market.

- Sadness may well increase the chance we want tospend. those who are sad are more likely to wantto sell at a lower price and buy at a higher price

- Disgust makes us want to get rid of everything.When we're disgusted we want to get rid of thethings we have and don't want to buy anything.




New frontier: Mirror

Neurons• Class of neurons in the ventral premotor cortex that discharge both:

- when animal performs object-directed action

- when animal observes OD action in others

• Subset appear to be “communicative” motor neurons

• Functions

- Imitation

- Action understanding

•Potentially important for understanding social learning and imitation effects

• Being investigated in social-emotional impairments such as autism,Asperger’s disorder, and schizophrenia

• May be important in “empathy”




Part 2

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Social Cognition




What is Social

Cognition?• Essentially, cognition in the wild (out of thelabs). It is a very broad area of research.

• Social influences to individual cognition,hence including judgments and evaluations.

• A complex mixture of intra-group, inter-

groups dynamics that alter our cognition.• From the effect of groups on the individual to

the more ‘social’ nature of human knowledge.

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Areas of inquires

• Intragroup processes and shared cognition

•Inter-groups dynamics

• Stereotyping

• Conformity

• Group processes and construction of socialrepresentations




Social Influence /

Obedience and compliance• Milgram (1963): Classic but controversial study of

compliance under duress from an ‘expert’experimenter. Near lethal electric shocks applied to

‘stooge’ connected to apparatus in mock learningstudy.

• Milgram (1974) explained that subjects felt underpressure but did not believe that the experimenter

would allow harm to come to ‘stooge’.‘Nothing isbleaker than the sight of a person striving yet not fullyable to control his own behaviour in a situation of consequence to him’ (Milgram, 1974, pp. xiii) .

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Milgram /2

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15 75 135 1 95 255 3 15 3 75 435

Volts

Predicted

Actual

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Social Influence

Processes• Other classic studies on compliance and normative

influence

• Sherif (1935): Individual vs. group condition in‘moving light’ or ‘autokinetic’ experiment. In groupconditions there was a tendency for estimates toconverge and individual re-tests suggestedinternalization of the group norm

• Asch (1952): Line comparison experiment,conflicting perceptual information and socialpressure

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Sherif (1935): Condition (a) starting alone then

group situation

Social influence processes

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2

4

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Alone Group

T1

Group

T2

Group

T3

Time of judgement

Subject 1

Subject 2Subject 3

I n c h e s o f e

s t i m a t e d

m o v e m e n t

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Asch (1952)

• How groupschange the way

we behave• Asch (1952):

Classicexperiment

examiningnormativeinfluenceeffects.

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Estimation of line lengths byindividual in group comprised of

experimenter’s confederates




Stanford prison

ex eriment• Probably the most known experiment in social

psychology, by P. Zimbardo, Stanford University.

•The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoneror prison guard. Roles were assigned randomly.

• Average individuals became either torturers or

passive victims.

• Illustration of the power of social roles andsettings


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology





Group Polarisation

• Polarization refers to the enhancement of the dominant group perception or opinion

after discussion/negotiation (Moscovici &Zavalloni, 1969)

• People become more polarized from initial

starting position e.g. Myers and Bishop(1970) prejudice levels after a groupdiscussion

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Group Polarisation /2

• Three Theoretical Explanations

➡ Normative influence: People maintain their beliefs in thesocially desirable direction so as not to ‘stand out’

➡ Informational influence: (Isenberg, 1986) Newinformation is made available and the shift is a function of the proportion of arguments in favour of one side, theirclarity and novelty.

➡ Social Identity: (Turner et al., 1989) People construct a‘group norm’ and then conform to that norm, results in apolarised ‘in-group’ norm. Processes of self-categorisation and deindividuation occur.

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Theories of Social

Influence• Social influence is affected by NORMATIVE

influence e.g. Asch’s (1952) experiments

• NORMATIVE influence is conforming tothe positive expectations of others =behavioural compliance in group contexts

• INFORMATIONAL influence refers to theadoption of objective/external sources of information (Deutch & Gerrard, 1955)

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Social Representation

Theor• A theory of social construction of knowledge (Moscovici, 1961).Studying less the individual more the social.

• Marková (2003) explains that cognition, from a socialrepresentational perspective, is based upon a dialogicalunderstanding of the mind.

• Social representations theorists regard cognition as socio-cultural, as dynamic and, hence, as something that cannot besimply reduced to the level of the individual (Marková, 2003).Hence, it is important to reconstitute the essentially socio-

historical nature of cognition. Consequently, social representationstheory moves beyond the narrow definition of social cognition asindividual cognition about others or influenced by others(Verheggen & Baerveldt, 2001).




Ref.

• Ellen Peters ‘The functions of affect in the construction of preferences’ In:Lichtenstein, S., & Slovic, P. (2006). The construction of preference. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

• Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain.

New York: Putnam

• Cooper, Joel; Kimberly, Kelly, A. and Kimberly Weaver. Attitudes, Norms andSocial Groups. In Brewer, M. B., & Hewstone, M. (2004). Social cognition.Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

• Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge,Mass: Harvard University Press.

• Cacioppo, J. T., Visser, P. S., & Pickett, C. L. (2006). Social neuroscience: Peoplethinking about thinking people. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

• Moscovici, S. (2001). Social representations: Explorations in social psychology.New York: New York University Press.

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