Chapter 11 Emotional behaviours

Emotional situations arouse 2 branches of the autonomic nervous system:

1. Sympathetic: stimulates organs (heart) while inhibiting stomach, and intestines (fight or
flight).
2. Parasympathetic: increases digestion and other processes that save energy and prepare for
later events
However, both systems work together such as in nausea where sympathetic stimulation of
the stomach happens and parasympathetic stimulation of the intestines and salivary glands
 Opposing views:
o Autonomic nervous system view related to emotion: frightening situationfearrun
away
o James-Lange theory: frightening situationrun awayfear
 Arousal and actions lead to the feeling aspect of emotion
 Eventappraisal (cognitive)action (behavioural)emotion (feeling)
 Is physiological arousal necessary for emotional feelings?
o Pure autonomic failure: output from the autonomic nervous system to the body fails,
either completely or almost completely. Someone with this condition does not react to
stressful experiences with changes in heart rate, blood pressure or sweating. According
to James-Lange theory we would expect people to not experience emotion.
Nonetheless, they report having emotions like anyone else, but much less intensely than
before.
o Botox: physicians use it to paralyze muscles for frowning. Study found that temporarily
Botox patients reported weaker emotional responses when they watched short videos.
 Is physiological arousal sufficient for emotions?
o Although physiological responses are seldom sufficient to produce emotional
feelings, they do contribute.
 Increases in heart rate intensify ratings of both pleasant and unpleasant
emotions, and contribute mostly in people who are most sensitive to their
internal state
 Holding a pen with teeth (smile) and lips (prevents a smile). People rated the
cartoons funnier when they held it with their teeth.
 Researchers attached golf tees on people’s faces and told them to keep
them attached, creating a frowning face. Then they were asked to rate
photographs as pleasant or unpleasant. The frowners rated the pictures as
more unpleasant.
 Mobius syndrome: cannot move facial muscles to smile.
 Is emotion a useful concept?
o Traditionally the limbic system (forebrain areas surrounding the thalamus) have
been regarded as critical for emotion, but no type of emotion consistently activates
one brain area and no brain area is associated with only one emotion.
o Emotions are a category such as weeds are a real category. Nothing in nature makes
weeds different from flowers, but people favour flowers

Do people have a limited number of basic emotions?

 People identify emotions by looking at people’s faces, but sometimes facial expression alone
did not help. Body posture, tone of voice, context and gestures help with identifying.
  Behavioural activation system: activity of the left hemisphere, frontal, and temporal lobes
(happiness and anger)
 Behavioural inhibition system: activity of the right hemisphere, frontal and temporal lobes
(fear and disgust)

The functions of emotion

 Emotions and moral decisions: the footbridge and lifeboat dilemma activate areas related to
emotion including parts of the prefrontal cortex and cingulate gyrus because you identify
with that person. People with the strongest autonomic arousal are the least likely to make a
logical decision to kill one and save the others.
 Decision making after brain damage that impairs emotions:
o Prefrontal cortex damage: impulsive decisions, without pausing to think of
consequences
o Ventromedial prefrontal damage: decreased trust
o Iowa gambling task: 4 decks of cards, the first 2 win more but lose more, second 2
win less and lose less. People with prefrontal or amygdala damage, are slow in
processing emotional information and pick the first 2 all the time.

Attack behaviours

 Effect of hormones: high testosterone levels are more common among men convicted of
violent crimes than for those convicted of less violent crimes, but the differences are small.
This could be due to the fact that testosterone facilitates aggression and cortisol inhibits it.
Therefore, aggression depends on the testosterone-cortisol ratio, not testosterone alone!
Also, serotonin tends to inhibit violent impulses
 Serotonin synapses and aggressive behaviour:
o Nonhuman animals: mice with lower 5-HIAA (serotonin’s main metabolite) had
lower levels of serotonin turnover, thus being more aggressive. Same goes for
monkeys. Evolutionary speaking, natural selection has not eliminated serotonin
turnover genes because evolution selects for a moderate amount of aggression and
anxiety. Moreover, aggressiveness could be seen as a high-risk, high-payoff strategy!
A monkey who has low 5-HIAA starts many fights and may die young, but may also
survive and achieve dominant status!
o Humans: follow up studies on people released from prison found that those with
lower serotonin turnover had a greater probability of further convictions for violent
crimes. On the other hand, serotonin by itself, is not an important enough factor to
enable us to make predictions about a given individual.
 Heredity and environment in violence: heat and lead tend to increase violence
environmentally based. The gene controlling MAOA breaks down some of the neuron
producing serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, preventing possible accumulation of an
excessive amount. Unlike previous findings, low activity MAOA, so less breaking down
serotonin and having more for release leads to aggression. However, the gene depends on
prior experience (seriously troubled childhood environment)

Fear and anxiety

 Role of the amygdala: the only built in mechanism of fear is the startle reflex, in which
information goes from the cochlear nucleus in the medulla to an area in the pons that
commands testing the muscles, especially neck muscles because the neck is vulnerable to
 injury. After damage to the amygdala, the startle reflex becomes more consistent from one
time or situation to another.
 Studies of rodents: pairing a stimulus with a loud noise creates a startle response.
Investigators have determined that the amygdala is important for enhancing the startle
reflex. It’s important for learning what to fear but it is not the only type of fear conditioning!
 Studies of monkeys: Kluver-Bucy syndrome, tame and placid, inability to learn what to fear.
 Response of the human amygdala to visual stimuli: human amygdala responds strongly
when people look at photos that arouse fear or photos of faces showing fear. To a lesser
extent it also responds to faces showing happiness or sadness. Contrary to what we might
guess, the amygdala responds more strongly when a facial expression is a bit ambiguous or
difficult to interpret. Apparently, the amygdala is active when it is working hard to interpret
emotion-related information.
 Individual differences in amygdala response and anxiety: people with reduced serotonin
reuptake tend to have increased responses to threat and increased attention to threatening
stimuli, especially in social situations. As a result, they are more likely than others to have
anxiety disorders. Individual differences in anxiety correlate strongly with amygdala activity.
However, anxiety depends on more than just the amygdala! An effective coping strategy is
reappraisal (reinterpreting the strategy as less threatening). Moreover, people with higher
anxiety reactivity (high reactive amygdala) react strongly to real or perceived dangers, and
therefore support strong protection of those dangers.
 Damage to the human amygdala: people with Urbach-Wiethe disease accumulate calcium in
the amygdala until it wastes away. Thus, they have extensive damage to the amygdala
without much damage to surrounding structures. Similar to Kluver-Bucy syndrome in
monkeys! The amygdala is important for imagining fear or thinking about danger that’s why
SM could not draw a facial expression of fear! Why is that? Because the amygdala
automatically directs attention toward emotionally significant stimuli, even without your
awareness. Some with damage to the amygdala doesn’t have this automatic tendency. This
suggest that the amygdala is responsible for detecting emotional information and directing
the brain areas to pay attention to it in a proper way rather than being responsible for
feeling fear or other emotions

Anxiety disorders

 Panic disorder: links to abnormalities in the hypothalamus, and not necessarily the
amygdala. Associated with decreased activity of GABA (inhibitory neurotransmitter) and
increased orexin (wakefulness and activity).
 PTSD: Smaller than average hippocampus people are more susceptible. We know that from
a study with monozygotic twins who both had the same hippocampus, one went to war, one
did not, and the one who went to war developed PTSD

Relief from anxiety

 Pharmacological relief: Drugs available to decrease anxiety are mostly GABA increasing
related, which inhibits anxiety. Benzodiazepines, bind to GABAA receptor, and twist the
receptor so that GABA binds more easily. Benzodiazepines thus facilitate the effects of GABA
(chloride ions cross the membrane, hyperpolarizing the cell, inhibitory synapse).
Benzodiazepines exert their anti-anxiety effects in the amygdala, hypothalamus, midbrain,
and several other areas
  Alcohol as an anxiety reducer: alcohol promotes the flow of chloride ions through the
GABAA receptor complex by binding strongly at a special site found on only certain GABA
receptors.
 Learning to erase anxiety:
o Systematic desensitization: gradual exposure until fear is gone but fear does not
fully go away
o After consolidation of fear (strengthen of fear) it can be reconsolidated by bringing a
reminder bringing it into a labile state and have a well-timed extinction experience
which can weaken the memory

Stress and general adaptation syndrome

 General adaptation syndrome (Hans Selye)

1. Alarm: adrenal glands release epinephrine (hormone) thereby stimulating the
sympathetic nervous system enabling fight or flight. The adrenal glands also release
cortisol which increases blood glucose, providing the body with extra energy, and
aldosterone which is important for maintaining blood salt and blood volume. To
maintain energy for emergency activity, the body temporarily suppresses less urgent
activities such as sexual arousal.
2. Resistance: sympathetic response declines, but the adrenal glands continue
secreting hormones. The body adapts to the prolonged situation in whatever way it
can such as by decreasing activity to save energy.
3. Exhaustion: individual is tired, inactive and vulnerable because the nervous and
immune systems no longer have the energy to sustain responses.

Stress and the Hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal cortex axis (HPA axis)

 Activation of the hypothalamus induces the anterior pituitary gland to secrete

adrenocorticotropic hormone which in turn stimulates the human adrenal cortex to secrete
cortisol, which enhances metabolic activity, elevates blood vessels of sugar, and increases
alertness. Cortisol is regarded as the stress hormone. Compared to the autonomic system it
reacts more slowly, but dominates the response to prolonged stressors
 The immune system: Leukocytes (white blood cells)
 B cells: mature mostly in the bone-marrow, secrete antibodies, which are Y-
shaped proteins that attach to particular antigens. Every cell has surface
proteins called antigens, and when the B cells find an unfamiliar antigen
they attack the cell (virus, bacteria, organ transplant)
 T Cells: mature in the thymus gland and attack intruders directly, others help
other t cells or B cells to multiply
 Natural killer cells: attack tumour cells and cells infected with viruses. Unlike
B and T cells, they attack all intruders

In response to an infection leukocytes produce Cytokines (small proteins) that

combat infections. Cytokines stimulate the vagus nerve and trigger the release of
prostaglandins that cross the blood-brain barrier and stimulate the hypothalamus to
produce fever, sleepiness Etc. Aspirin and ibuprofen inhibit prostaglandins thus reducing
fever and the other symptoms.

 Effects of stress on the immune system: in response to brief stressful experiences, the
nervous system activates the immune system to increase its production of natural killer cells
 and the secretion of cytokines. Increased cytokines combat infection but also release
prostaglandins that reach the hypothalamus resulting in flew like symptoms
 Prolonged stress can also harm the hippocampus because stress releases cortisol, which
enhances metabolic activity throughout the body. When metabolic activity is high in the
hippocampus, its cells are more vulnerable to toxins or overstimulation.