Zajonc and LeDoux

5 Key excerpts on "Zajonc and LeDoux"

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  Understanding Trauma and Emotion

  Dealing with trauma using an emotion-focused approach

  • Colin Wastell(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The impact of the theory of evolution on many areas of Western thought is also evident in emotion theory. In 1872, Darwin published ‘The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animal’. This work contended that emotion was primarily an instinctive mechanism that was adaptive in its functioning. Its expression was centred in the muscles of the face. The evolutionary purpose of these reactions was self-preservative and their survival value was the reason for their continued existence. Darwin’s theory was largely ignored until well into the twentieth century.

  Zajonc’s view of the primacy of emotion

  Zajonc’s position on the place of emotion in human functioning was a direct challenge to the parsimony of the position of Lazarus and others. Zajonc (1980) asserted that affective and cognitive processes were under the control of separate and partially independent systems. He appealed to common experiences such as the resistance of emotional judgments, difficulty in verbalising feelings and the separation of affective memory components from the content of the experiences. Zajonc also cited a number of research findings to support his position regarding the primacy of affect. He included studies on ‘exposure effect of stimuli’ and emotional memory, and cited work on the hemispheric special-isation concerning the processing of emotional information. Zajonc speculated that coding for emotional material may be different and on separate systems. Greenberg and Safran (1987) comment that, whether ‘in the final analysis, Zajonc’s argument about the precognitive nature of affect is judged valid or not, we do believe that his work has served a vitally important function. It has challenged the prevailing assumption in experimental psychology that cognition is in some sense more fundamental than emotion’ (1987, p. 123).

  Lazarus (1982) replied to Zajonc and rebuffed him for confusing the debate by not providing a comprehensive definition of cognition. Lazarus stated that: ‘Information processing as an exclusive model of cognition is insufficiently concerned with the person as a source of meaning’ (1982, p. 1020). However, Zajonc (1984) replied that to broaden the definition of cognition was to obscure concepts such as perception. The debate between these two men culminated in emotion being seen as a concept worthy of study in its own right. No longer is emotion seen as the servant of cognition but, as Lazarus has said: ‘Emotion, of course, is not merely cognition, and I don’t believe any cognitivists have ever really suggested this’ (1991, p. 295). Lazarus has asserted that the makeup of emotion ‘includes… hot components [highly emotion charged], especially when there is mobilisation to deal with harms and benefits,’ (1991, p. 295). This assertion brings us to the next group of emotion theorists to be examined: the ‘evolutionary-expressive’ theorists, as Greenberg and Safran (1987) designate them.

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  Wild Experiment

  Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin

  • Donovan O. Schaefer(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Zajonc’s response a few years later was complex.116 He acknowl-edged that the disagreement was rooted in definitions, but insisted that his definition of cognition could be proven experimentally. His evidence for this was neuroanatomical—an appeal to triune-brain-style research show-ing an autonomous limbic system.117 But he also doubled down on a defini-tion of cognition as a consciously discriminated stimulus. What matters for our purposes is that the debate between Zajonc and Lazarus was actually over a narrow issue of the definition of cognition . Throughout the exchange, they were on the same page that, in Lazarus’s words, “cognition and emotion are usually fused in nature.”118 Writing in 2007, Dutch psychologists Mark Rotteveel and Hans Phaf agree that the issue all along was a conscious-nonconscious distinction rather than an affect-cognition distinc-tion.119 Justin Storbeck and Gerald Clore arrive at the same conclusion.120 “The concepts of ‘cognition’ and ‘emotion,’ ” they write, “are, after all, simply abstractions for two aspects of one brain in the service of action.”121 When we look at Lazarus and Zajonc’s dispute about interpreting mee, we see a debate where the two sides fundamentally agree about the main 126 CHAPTER 4 point of cogency theory. Affect, for all concerned, is the necessary infra-structure of cognition. Quibbling about the relationship between cognition and consciousness aside, this is a debate in which the background contours already align with the big argument of cogency theory. No one involved would disagree that every thought is enmeshed with feeling. Recent Studies on the Mere Exposure Effect: The Feeling of Familiarity and Racial Bias The debate about the extent to which feeling shapes cognition also sheds light on the big argument of this book. What is cogent for us is what feels true . But this feeling is not necessarily a reliable guide. The mee shows that we harbor preferences based on familiarity.

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  Shaping Psychology

  Perspectives on Legacy, Controversy and the Future of the Field

  • Tomasz Witkowski(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  © The Author(s) 2020 T. Witkowski Shaping Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50003-0_9

  Begin Abstract

  9. Joseph E. LeDoux: Fear, Anxiety, Emotions, Consciousness and Evolution

  Tomasz Witkowski

  1   

  (1) Wroclaw, Poland

   

    Tomasz Witkowski

  Email: [email protected]

  Start by asking what you want to understand about behavior, mind, and/or brain rather than by choosing a method you want to acquire. The questions are eternal but the methods are fleeting. End Abstract

  At the beginning of The Emotional Brain , Joseph LeDoux writes:

  My father was a butcher. I spent much of my childhood surrounded by beef. At an early age, I learned what the inside of a cow looks like. And the part that interested me the most was the slimy, wiggly, wrinkled brain. Now, many years later, I spend my days, and some nights, trying to figure out how brains work. And what I’ve wanted to know most about brains is how they make emotions. (LeDoux 1996 )

  It is indeed a quite unusual beginning for someone who came to revolutionize the way psychologists understand emotions .

  LeDoux began his research under the wing of Michael Gazzaniga, a leading researcher in cognitive neuroscience . They began working together on understanding the functioning of split-brain patients . To further those efforts, they built a laboratory inside a trailer hitched to a pumpkin-colored Ford van and frequently traveled from Long Island to see patients at their homes in Vermont and New Hampshire.

  As a postdoctoral fellow, he received technical training in state-of-the-art neuroscience techniques. Seeing that techniques for studying the human brain were limited at the time, he turned to studies of rodents where the brain could be examined in detail. He chose to focus on a simple behavioral model, Pavlovian fear conditioning . This turned out to be an outstanding choice, as it allowed him to discover the flow of information about a stimulus through the brain as it comes to control behavioral responses by way of sensory pathways to the amygdala . His discovery gave rise to the notion of two sensory roads to the amygdala, with the “low road” being a quick and dirty subcortical pathway for rapid activity behavioral responses to threats, and the “high road” providing slower but highly processed cortical information . His work shed light on how the brain detects and responds to threats, and how memories about such experiences are formed and stored through cellular, synaptic and molecular changes in the amygdala

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  The Timing of Neural and Behavioral Events

  • Rumjahn Hoosain(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Information Age Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The crucial point then is when and how such peripheral sensory pro- cesses lead to cognition or affective processing. In other words, the ques- tion of independence and primacy depends on when and where cognition and emotion part company, or do they ever part company. Zajonc accepted that cognition did not have to be deliberate or conscious but require some “mental work” or transformation of the sensory input. Lazarus’s position was that cognition of meaning did not have to be the end of a serial process starting with bits of the sensory input, but global and involved the person as a source of meaning. It can take place before the sensory input is clearly perceived. Cognition or cognitive appraisal thus appears early, and the ap- praisal (possibly unconscious) of whether the sensory input implies some- thing favorable or not to one’s well-being leads to emotions. Ultimately, both authors seem to realize the inconclusiveness of their debate. Lazarus wrote that, “Zajonc can no more prove that a cognition is not present in any emotion, much less before it occurs, than I can prove it is present” (Laza- rus, 1984, p. 126). Zajonc also wrote that, “Of course the question con- tested here cannot be fully resolved unless we have a full understanding of consciousness ... at the moment beyond our reach” (Zajonc, 1984, p. 118). More recent work on the neurology of cognitive and emotional processes might shed more heat if not light on this discussion. Before we turn to this we should note that the debate between Zajonc and Lazarus, although not always referred to in subsequent discussions regarding emotion and cogni- tion, delineated most of the issues and parameters to be reckoned. Conceptual Distinction of Cognition and Emotion Zajonc acknowledged that there were no relevant neuroanatomical or neurophysiological data when he presented his views, and apart from the mere exposure studies there were also not many controlled functional stud- ies.

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  The Advertised Mind

  Groundbreaking Insights into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising

  • Erik Du Plessis(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Kogan Page

    (Publisher)

  Human beings feel pleasure and pain as well. Could these be the trigger for our brain’s focused activity? Learning and emotion 61 Professor Joseph LeDoux, of the Centre for Neural Science at New York University (and author of The Emotional Brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life (1996)) has done research into what happens to our brains to make us feel love, hate, anger and joy. Do we control our emotions, or do they control us? Needless to say, he does not have the final answers (yet), but he certainly has a better idea than most. Despite the alluring title of his book, LeDoux tends to focus on just one emotion: fear. Understanding why we feel fear, and how it affects what we do, gives us many clues to how other basic emotions might work. Fear – that is, a reaction to danger, or something that warns of potential danger – is a primitive emotion that has an obvious relationship to our ability to survive. It is important that we react with fear when we are in a dangerous situation: and this means that we need to recognize that a situa-tion is dangerous. One example Professor LeDoux uses is going on a hike in the country (in an area in which snakes are sometimes found) and noticing a twig shaped like a snake. Immediately, involuntarily, you are afraid. This produces a physical reaction: you will freeze, and your heart rate will increase. Then, with luck, you will realize that the twig really is only a twig. Slowly your body will return to its normal state, and you go happily on with your hike. It often takes only a split second before you realize that the fear is unfounded. But even if you quickly conclude that it is only a twig, you will still have reacted with fear before that awareness kicks in.

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