Proposed Syllabus for Cognition and EmotionLectures

Course Co-ordinator: Anne Richards (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Objectives

This course will provide an introduction to cognition and emotion. Behavioural and neurophysiological research with both clinical and non-clinical populations will be evaluated. The focus will be on anxiety and anxiety disorder. The course will examine the literature on cognitive biases related to anxiety.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this course, students should be able to:

  • Critically evaluate the main theories in cognition and emotion.
  • Have an understanding of the methodologies used in affective neuroscience (behavioural and neurophysiological).
  • Have an understanding of the cognitive biases associated with anxiety

Course Format

The course will be lectures.

Topics

Attention and Anxiety: The effects of anxiety on different types of attentional processes (e.g., attentional capture and attentional control) will be evaluated. Issues such as whether emotional processing requires attention will be examined, and the relationship between top-down and bottom-up processes will be presented. Theories that have been proposed to account for the research findings will be critiqued.

Lecture Outline

1. Biological and cognitive bases of anxiety

2. The role of maladaptive schemas in anxiety

3. Cognitive and neurobiological theories of anxiety disorders and experimental methods used to investigate these

4. Evidence for attentional biases in Generalised Anxiety Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

5. The impact of reduced attentional control within PTSD and GAD.

6. Evidence that individual differences in working memory and attentional control abilities impact on severity and/or experience of symptoms within these two disorders

7. Summary

Interpretation and Anxiety: An overview of research into interpretation biases and ambiguity resolution will be presented. Issues such as the relationship between automatic and strategic components in ambiguity resolution will be examined. A review of the theories and methods used in this area will be presented.

Lecture Outline

1. Information processing biases

2. Interpretative biases

3. Beck’s Schema theory revisited

4. Bower’s (1981;1987) network theory

5. Investigations using behavioural experimental methods

6. Automatic vs. strategic processing

7. Training Effects

8. Context effects in interpretation

9. Neurobiology of threat interpretation

10. Summary

Suggested Reading

General Reading

Dalgleish, T., & Power, M. (1999). Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Evans, D. (2001). Emotion: The Science of Sentiment. Oxford University Press.

Lane, R.D. and Nadel, L. (2000) Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion. Oxford University Press.

Le Doux, J. (1996). The emotional brain. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Yiend, J. (2004). Cognition, emotion and psychopathology. Cambridge University Press.

Ward, L. (2006). The student’s guide to cognitive neuroscience. Psychology Press: Hove

Specific Reading

Bishop, S. (2007). Neurocognitive mechanisms of anxiety: an integrative account. Trends in Cognitive Science, 11, 307-316.

Bishop, S. et al. (2004). State anxiety modulation of the amygdala response to unattended threat-related stimuli. Journal of Neuroscience, 24, 10364-10368.

Blanchette, I. & Richards, A. (2003) Anxiety and the interpretation of ambiguous information: Beyond the emotion-congruent effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132 (2): 294-309.

Blanchette, I. Richards, A., & Cross, A. (2007). Anxiety and the interpretation of ambiguous facial expressions: The influence of contextual cues. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 60, 1011-1116.

Eimer, M. & Holmes, A. (2007). Event-related brain potential correlates of emotional face processing. Neuropsychologia, 45, 15-31.

Eimer, M., Kiss, M., & Holmes, A. (2008). Links between rapid ERP responses to fearful faces and conscious awareness. Journal of Neuropsychology, 2, 165-181.

Eysenck, M., Mogg, K., May, J., Richards, A., & Mathews, A. (1991). Interpretation of ambiguity related to threat in anxiety. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100, 144-150.

Grey, S. & Mathews, A. (2000). Effects of training on interpretation of emotional ambiguity. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 53, 1143-1162.

Holmes, A., Vuilleumier, P., & Eimer, M. (2003). The processing of emotional facial expression is gated by spatial attention: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Cognitive Brain Research, 16, 174-184.

Mathews, A. & MacLeod, C. (2002) Induced processing biases have causal effects on anxiety. Cognition & Emotion, 16, 331-354.

Mathews, A., Richards, A. & Eysenck, M. (1989). Interpretation of homophones related to threat in anxiety. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 98, 236-240.

Milad, M. R., Wright, C. I., Orr, S.P., Pitman, R.K., Quirk, G.J., & Rauch, S.L. (2007). Recall of fear extinction in humans acivates the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus in concert. Biological Psychiatry, 62, 446-454.

Richards, A. (2004). The resolution of ambiguity and anxiety. In J. Yiend (ed). Cognition, Emotion and Psychopathology, Cambridge University Press

Richards, A. & French, C.C. (1992). An anxiety-related bias in semantic activation when processing threat/neutral homographs. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 45, 503-525.

Richards, A., French, C.C., Calder, A. J., Webb, B., Fox, R., & Young, A. W. (2002). Anxiety-related bias in the classification of emotionally ambiguous facial expressions. Emotion, 2(3), 273-287.

Vuilleumier, P. (2002). Facial expressions and selective attention. Current Opinion in Psychiatry, 15, 291-300.

Vuilleumier, P. (2005). How brains beware: neural mechanisms of emotional attention. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 585-594.

Whalen, P.J. (1998). Fear, vigilance, and ambiguity: Initial neuroimaging studies of the human amygdala. Curent Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 177-188.