Emotion, a quit simple term but hard to define. In this weeks lecture and seminar we discussed the different characerizations of emotions and how humans get emotional. Many previous done research suggests that the amygdala is responsible for our emotions (Adolphs, 1999). The amygdala is a small part of the hippocampus that takes in information that is provided by our senses and experiences from the outside world and processes these information. The amygdala is linked to the higher cognitive processor and the lower cognitive processor, also know as hypothalamic and brainstem systems. It can be said that based on all the cognitive functions the amygdala has been given, a emotional reaction is the outcome. However it can still be argued that the amygdala is not the only important system that is related to the retrieving and processing of information for our emotions. The additional reading i did for this week, Adolphs (1999) also suggested that the amygdala is responsible for decision-making and the dealing with memory.
Information retrieved from:
Adolphs, R. (1999). The Human Amygdala and Emotion. Neuroscientist, 5: 125
A very good video that helped me to understand the different theories on how our emotion is retrieved and processed in the brain:
In the seminar, we did a fantastic experiment on emotion. Viewing some pictures of faces, that showed an emotion and afterwards stating what emotion that was. It was really interesting to to such experiment, which i had never done before. afterwards we discussed the gambling task, which we had to perform before too. The gambling task, and so was about that there were four deck cards and you were asked to make the most money by choosing in each round one card, however some of the cards also carry a negative outcome, like 50 US Dollars minus the money you had already gained. after a while I did notice though that if you either press A or C you gain money and if you press B or D you would loose, yo automatically, because i want to win, kept on pressing A, which made me very happy. The outcome of this experiment, which had been replicated by a few researches showed that decision-making is an important process of emotions, either conscious or unconscious. It can be argued if emotions are necessary to make such decision or decisions in general or if it would be better to see everything from the outside and have no emotional response to things at all.
