Classroom B: How's everyone doing?
Classroom B: I'm good. Ashley's good.
Classroom B: awesome.
Classroom B: Okay? So we have a, we have a couple of different things to talk about today, I think, should be a lot of lot of interesting and and fun discussion the first thing that we're talking about for the first half.
Classroom B: possibly a bit longer of the class is the relationship between emotions and cognitive Protestants.
Classroom B: so
Classroom B: emotions are are a fairly reversal on a different part of the bikes
Classroom B: responses that are automatic that are like they can be controlled some extent, but they're difficult to control.
Classroom B: They come with their own sort of
Classroom B: experience and feeling like, gonna sort of like what we might prefer with the development all in of emotions.
Classroom B: And they they play an important role in ice.
Classroom B: And what we're gonna do is we're gonna just briefly break down some some terminology stuff
Classroom B: that terminologies work
Classroom B: important for us.
Classroom B: And then what we're going to explore is the way that emotions and and cognition sort of have a bi-directional relationship. So we'll start by examining how emotions influence cognitive processes
Classroom B: and then turning to how our cognitive processes can then also change our emotions, which has some
Classroom B: direct applications that are discussed in the reading.
Classroom B: So
Classroom B: there are a couple different ways that we can conceptualize emotions. There are 2 primary ways, and neither one of them are wrong.
Classroom B: Neither one of them are correct or incorrect. They're just different ways of categorizing and thinking about emotions, and they each have their own use depending on the the problems that, for example.
Classroom B: solving.
Classroom B: So again, either are wrong. They're just useful in different circumstances.
Classroom B: One of the earliest
Classroom B: sort of ways of categorizing emotions is to identify this is the classic word of Mac Mini to identify that there seem to be some universal emotions so like the experience of just emotion, generally
Classroom B: personal humans. But it also seems to be to go a little bit deeper than that. And there it seemed to be specific emotions that are consistent across cultures societies as a way
Classroom B: personal.
Classroom B: So Eckman's primary universal emotions are happiness, sadness, anger here and discussed.
Classroom B: and then some people also add surprise
Classroom B: into that into that categorization.
Classroom B: This is this is something that likely comes up in other courses. Does anyone know, what led to the the idea that we have these sort of universal emotions that that transcend cultural boundaries
Classroom B: addressing settings. So they're worth worth discussing. Briefly.
Classroom B: they haven't encountered this, that before.
Classroom B: Okay, interesting. Yeah, I'm surprised. That hasn't come up before. But it's it's a relatively straightforward
Classroom B: piece of evidence that really suggests this. Okay, it's something coming in the chat.
Classroom B: Okay, Jared saying, there's some stuff in the sociology from the discussion of of music, and that does provide some evidence. But the the evidence that we can focus on is simpler. It's just the very simple fact, for, like sort of 2 simple facts that combine together, that can then be demonstrated empirically. And the first is just that it seems that across cultures
Classroom B: no matter what someone's cultural background is people will spontaneously produce the same facial expressions when experiencing these different emotions.
Classroom B: even if they might use different
Classroom B: words for them.
Classroom B: On top of spontaneously producing those facial expression. We also can
Classroom B: recognize, those facial expressions and and identify which emotion they are meant to convey. And the sort of original demonstration
Classroom B: involve going to people from one culture and just having them.
Classroom B: Facial expressions associated with devotional states, and then they bring those pictures
Classroom B: to other cultures and ask them to identify the emotional state that this
Classroom B: by the facial expression. And it's just perfect uniform.
Classroom B: It doesn't matter how many cultural boundaries cross people have no difficulty recognizing the motion. So
Classroom B: we'll correct.
Classroom B: suggesting to some extent that there must be something universal about them. It's not, it's not learned.
Classroom B: Like learning how to recognize the facial expressions, is learning, but making the facial expressions when in those emotional states is something that seems to be
Classroom B: innate, universal.
Classroom B: And then the general idea is that some different combinations of those emotional states could be sort of the more complicated types of emotions that are probably more culturally bound and prefer based on people's experience.
Classroom B: The the other key way that people tend to think about emotions is instead of identifying sort of discrete emotional categories instead dividing emotions up by 2 different dimensions. Basically 2 different characteristics that exist on a continuum and then discrete emotions like specific emotional categories, can fall to those points.
Classroom B: and the typical distinction that people make is between emotions that are higher nozzle and lower nozzle.
Classroom B: and between emotions that are positive valence and negative.
Classroom B: So when we're talking about bandwidths, we're talking about, essentially whether it's a good.
Classroom B: This comment, I'm sort of
Classroom B: positive.
Classroom B: pleasant feelings or things.
Classroom B: So something like, you know, happiness is a is it? Positive balanced emotion? Something like sounds. They're all negative emotions.
Classroom B: and then arousal is just sort of the the level of you can think of it. The level of excitement or hand
Classroom B: associated with it, regardless of whether it's positive or
Classroom B: so. You know, anger would typically be higher Roussele motion, whereas would typically
Classroom B: and that terminology is gonna be important for a lot of our our discussion. And then the the final sort of distinction that's going to be quite important for discussion is between emotional States and emotional traits.
Classroom B: Based on your reading of the of the chapters this week. What's what's the key difference between an emotional state versus in a multiple script.
Classroom B: Yeah, Avon has the right distinction, and I'll repeat it for some people here I'm doing the right distinction, but in the wrong.
Classroom B: So the the orders. Essentially the the distinction between emotional state is an emotional state is something where it's like, it's the emotion that you are current.
Classroom B: So it's like it's active in the moment you are viewing just emotional state whereas emotional traits are more sort of long term predisposition that will have towards certain emotional states. So, for example, somebody separated with generalized anxiety. Disorder with school would be so that we'd say scores high
Classroom B: on on traits inside.
Classroom B: because into their over overall, you know, from moment to moment, over the the longer period than their lives, they are just more likely to experience the emotional state
Classroom B: of anxiety.
Classroom B: But being an emotional state is just the emotion or emotions that you are currently
Classroom B: and that's gonna be one of the most important distinctions for us. Just because when we start to talk about the influences between emotions and and condition sometimes is going to be that your emotional state influences your cognitive processing.
Classroom B: And sometimes it's gonna be your sort of trait based predispositions are going to be moving forward
Classroom B: cop into processing
Classroom B: and vice versa.
Classroom B: Probably the processing could influence your
Classroom B: traits and your legal fees.
Classroom B: So those are some of the key terminology, some of the key distinctions, any
Classroom B: questions. Ashley. Looks like you maybe experience some technical difficulties. Are you? Good now?
Classroom B: Awesome.
Classroom B: Okay.
Classroom B: So you know what I wanted to just sort of look through a few examples of, first, the way that different emotional states and traits influence cognitive processes. And the 3 that we're gonna focus on are all emotion with memory, attention, and interpretation.
Classroom B: Once we're through that, then we'll go in the opposite end and look at some of the ways that changing your car processes can then influence most, particularly with with practical application that might change predisposition towards some, some usually negative.
Classroom B: Okay.
Classroom B: So
Classroom B: one of the sort of most reliable, most robust findings in the context of the the relationship between
Classroom B: emotion. Memory is something known as mood. Congruent is is something known as mood congruent. There are a couple of different ways of
Classroom B: so what we're looking at in this figure from the from the text here is an experiment in which people are onto a laboratory. And then the the typical way that you you examine a lot of this sort of state based emotional research is by by using what are called a motion induction
Classroom B: to do something to that, you do something to induce a particular move. If somebody might have to think about past experiences that are associated with different emotions give them things to read or listen to that are, you know, typically with those emotions, basically, you're trying to induce or create an emotional state.
Classroom B: So a momentary temporary emotional experience for that person.
Classroom B: So we take some people, and we we induce either a happy mood or a sad mood. And then we're going to give them a film where the narrative over. The story is either, you know, positive and happy, or
Classroom B: negative and sap.
Classroom B: Then we just have them recall as much above the the story as possible. And you know what we're looking at here is a typical mood, congruent memory effect, and the the general idea of a mood memory effect is that you're going to remember things
Classroom B: more effective if they match your your emotional.
Classroom B: So when people are happy, they remember more details about the happy story compared to the sad story. The people are sad, it's the opposite. And the fact that this case is much larger. Do you remember many more details about the sad story compared to the happy story.
Classroom B: So your emotional state is influencing the particular type of information that you are able to remember, based on how well it matches your current emotional state.
Classroom B: Same thing happens if you know instead, you induce one of those moves and retrieval. So if you just keep people neutral while they walk, either a happy or a sad film. And then, when they're asked to recall information about that, they're hoping to make happy or sad you get this.
Classroom B: They'll remember more about the Happy film. If they're happy they'll remember more about
Classroom B: gets even more detailed. If you give people a film that detects happy hands at moments. Then they'll selectively recall the facts that are consistent with the emotional state that they are. Currently
Classroom B: so it's a fairly powerful event, we tend to remember things that are consistent with both our mood at the time of that experience or event and our mood, while we're actually engaging in that recruit
Classroom B: a general pattern, making sense any questions about that
Classroom B: thoughts.
Classroom B: This has some important implications. Sorry Jared has on the other chats
Classroom B: it, Jared is. It's not even quite that we we tend to remember negative events more than I'm rephrasing, I'm admittedly, rephrasing your language a little bit and rephrasing problem, and it's not dramatic to
Classroom B: just negative versus positive events so truly traumatic events. Yes, it's true that we tend to remember those
Classroom B: more vividly, more more accurately. But what we're looking at here is not not necessarily the
Classroom B: I
Classroom B: extreme levels of traumatic versus non traumatic. We're just looking at a positive versus negative. So like. You know, fax events experiences their
Classroom B: happy or sad and you're going to selectively remember, happy or sad, depending on which mood you're in. If you're happy, you'll remember happy things if you're sad and remember sad things.
Classroom B: And it's actually
Classroom B: outside of the extreme examples of traumatic events is actually the the opposite that most people who, you know aren't experiencing sort of psychological distress or disorders will typically selectively remember positive things. You know, we discuss this a little bit. When you're expecting autobiographical memory.
Classroom B: we tend to remember, like happy events, positive events.
Classroom B: So we have this sort of memory bias towards the positive, happy.
Classroom B: Okay, it's in our life
Classroom B: unless
Classroom B: you're somebody who is experiencing and suffering from depression.
Classroom B: especially critical depression. So, major depressive disorder, you get the complete opposite, or most of
Classroom B: autobiographical events that they recall. If they're asked to do so once that be negative things associated with new windows, things like that.
Classroom B: and with those 2 facts in mind, it's it like the most sensible explanation does seem to be a Google and memory explanation. It's not just an autobiography.
Classroom B: Because if it's if it's if it was just in autobiographical memory, then you get a bit of an interpretive problem where it could be the case that you know, as we know, consistent negative live events
Classroom B: do tend to often to experience a bit of.
Classroom B: So it could just be that they remember more negative events because they've experienced more negative events.
Classroom B: But we didn't demonstrate the exact same dissociation between healthy controls and full experience in just very simple lab experiments.
Classroom B: So we just give people a typical like word memory experiment. Where you get a piece of words and ask, try to recall them or recognize them.
Classroom B: Most people experience a very slight, very small memory benefit for 400 neutral words or positive words compared to negatively balanced words. The words that are associated with status.
Classroom B: But people experiencing depression show the opposite. They can show the
Classroom B: fairly substantial memory boost for words that are associated with the negative emotions.
Classroom B: There's again another demonstration that our mood. And in this case we're moving from emotional states to emotional traits
Classroom B: tends to influence the type of information that we remember remember information more effectively if it's easier with our emotional experience
Classroom B: when we later on, when we discuss the the ways that cognitive processes and sort of altering your your thought processes can influence emotional experiences. This becomes critically important because, as the as the text outlines
Classroom B: one of the issues with with
Classroom B: option. Is that this mood, congruent memory issue sort of creates like a bit of a vicious cycle
Classroom B: where you're experiencing higher levels of sadness and friction, which means, you remember, and reminisce on negative experiences. Your life, which then leads to more experiences of suppression.
Classroom B: I just loops and moves and moves
Classroom B: at some point. You need to disrupt that offer.
Classroom B: but we'll talk about them in more detail.
Classroom B: Interestingly.
Classroom B: there doesn't seem to be any mood congruent effects associated with experiences of anxiety. So we don't see a peril kind of finding with, for example, like people who are high on on trade and anxiety, having a sort of memory bias towards
Classroom B: seems to be kind of restricted to the depression.
Classroom B: but
Classroom B: there are influences of anxiety on cognitive processes based on your reading of the of the text. What are some of the ways that experiences anxiety seem to change some of our cognitive processes? Not necessarily memory.
Classroom B: We don't see the reliably find those patterns, but it does include some cognitive processes.
Classroom B: What are some examples?
Classroom B: Any thoughts.
Annie Lewis: Would it be our attention? Boss.
Classroom B: Yeah. So yeah, that is that is correct. So and and Jared saying, Yeah, everybody else is already mentioned, and we tend not to find these
Classroom B: anxiety. I mean, yeah, anxiety but and it's correct that we do seem to see an influence of of experience, of the anxiety in sort of earlier stage onto the processes, such as attention
Classroom B: and and we'll see that, you know, to sort of spoil the the story a little bit. We we also sort of see an interesting parallel finding where we see influences of depression and sadness on on memory processes. But we don't see influences, anxiety on memory processes. Then things flip over for attention, anxiety seems to impact attention, but depression and sadness do not.
Classroom B: and there are a couple of ways to demonstrate the the ways that I share this.
Classroom B: There are a couple of ways to demonstrate the ways that anxiety, influence attention, and again, it just involves. It requires us to
Classroom B: devise experiments that's.
Classroom B: you know, require attention and see how different experiences of state and trade anxiety influence those processes.
Classroom B: The the first demonstration that we can cover is something called an emotional scrutiny.
Classroom B: based on other classes are people familiar with the the Standards group caf.
Classroom B: they don't remember what the screw task involves.
Annie Lewis: Isn't it like when you read the colors of words and they're printed in different colors. And you've got a read within
Annie Lewis: certain timeframe.
Annie Lewis: basically something like that.
Classroom B: Yeah, no, you are exactly. It's not even something like that. You are exactly correct.
Classroom B: So the the only thing that you need to do as a participant in this group. Task is as quickly and accurately as possible read the color of the font.
Classroom B: in other words, the color of the font itself.
Classroom B: So you get these different color words that are printed in in different font colors. And you know you're asked to identify the font color itself for the ones on the left when they are consistent, or what we call congruent trials.
Classroom B: When the font color and the word for the color are are consistent. It's pretty easy and then it's a little bit more difficult when they're so we're trying to read the font color blue, but the word says Green. You suffer interference because you kind of automatically, because we're very used to reading things you kind of automatically want to say green. So you need to prevent that response. You need to inhibit it. In some way.
Classroom B: The emotional group task just changes a little bit. The task is still to read the Co. Identify the color of a font when you're reading words. But instead of change making the words correspond to different colors. You make some of them emotionally neutral, and some of them emotionally, negatively.
Classroom B: So you you'll you have words that are associated with like fear and anxiety, stress and things like that. You got like beautiful words like chair coffee things like that.
Classroom B: Obviously just looking around the room and saying the first things that come to mind. And then you get negative words like, you know, snake spider got things like that.
Classroom B: And then what you end up finding is that people who score high on on traffic anxiety. So people who are predisposed to experience those anxiety show some screw like interference with the name that we emotionally balance work.
Classroom B: So when they see words that are.
Classroom B: since you see words that are associated with negative emotions associated with fear and anxiety. It takes them longer to read the color compared to just healthy controls who score lower.
Classroom B: There's some other ways to demonstrate this.
Classroom B: This is just a basic depiction of of some of call up the clouds work. He's at University of Waterloo, and then this is known as a dot.
Classroom B: And so this is the basic depiction of the
Classroom B: the steps that you go through on each trial task.
Classroom B: So, going from top to bottom first.
Classroom B: start with the fixation point, just to make sure that you are starting the trial by looking at the center of the screen. Then that disappears, and 2 words appear on the left and right side of the screen. One of them is neutral. Words on the right
Classroom B: isn't isn't sort of systematically associated with any particular emotional state
Classroom B: like forest, and it might be positive emotional state. And then you have death, which is, you know, much more systematically associated with negative emotional states. And then
Classroom B: that appears not not very, not very large, but a half that 500 ms
Classroom B: and then in one of those 2 positions, so either on the left or on the right you get a letter that appears in this particular example, the letter
Classroom B: E or F,
Classroom B: and your task as participant is just. You have 2 buttons, and as quickly as possible, you either say E or F,
Classroom B: so very basic perceptual processing
Classroom B: that
Classroom B: procedure make sense.
Classroom B: Okay.
Classroom B: so you probably start to piece things together a little. And there's been some sort of commonalities in these these
Classroom B: procedures demonstrations of how emotion can influence cognitive processes. If we
Classroom B: take people who score both high and low on, create anxiety, what's going to be the key difference in performance on this task between high, anxious, highly anxious individuals and non anxious individuals. What's going to be the major difference in behavior that demonstrates the influence of emotion.
Classroom B: So
Classroom B: let's first imagine, oh, let's give him chat. This is a universal thing. So no what I'm what I'm asking for. So let's let's break this down, participant by participant. So let's start with. Because it's it's not a universal thing, because it's going to differ. People's performance on this task will change depending on whether they are high anxiety or low income.
Classroom B: So
Classroom B: let's first start by start with low anxiety. So for low anxiety, do we expect any difference based on a location that the layer appears in
Classroom B: like. So if if the letter that they're supposed to process and identify appears where the word death was located or where the word force was located. Do we expect any difference
Classroom B: for low anxiety? Individuals.
Ashley Wray: Mo more likely to be on the forest side.
Classroom B: Yup. Ashley is exactly correct. Moreland could be in the forest side, and I'll just add some precision to it a small difference.
Classroom B: and we can start to piece this together.
Classroom B: Okay, Karen. Glad I'm at I, Garrett. I'm glad I answered your question, even if I did so slightly, accidentally
Classroom B: for high anxiety individuals, we're gonna get the opposite pattern. And this is sort of similar to the types of memory effects that we see with people with depression. We get a bias towards words that are associated with, or sort of predisposed emotional traits. So that's exactly what we see.
Classroom B: this. This this chart has the one of the differences a little bit exaggerated, but gives us the general idea.
Classroom B: And what we're just looking at. Here is the amount of time
Classroom B: it takes people to identify which you know the the letter that appeared.
Classroom B: What we're looking at is then breaking that down by words that are associated with threats or words that are not associated with threat
Classroom B: A word like death is often associated with threats, breaking that down by high trading, so anxious individuals and low trading just individuals. And again, we see that sort of interaction pattern.
Classroom B: People who score low in trade anxiety respond a bit faster when when the letter appears in a non threat related word sort of neutral, balanced word.
Classroom B: People in high train anxiety show the opposite. They respond faster if the weather appeared under death compared to force. And remember that lower on the Y-axis here is better performance, because what's on the Y-axis is in milliseconds. How long it takes people to respond
Classroom B: faster responding suggests that they were better able to process that information
Classroom B: and the general explanation here is that people who score high and trade anxiety when just based with 2 words, one of which is neutral, one of which is related to threats, they will focus or fixate
Classroom B: on the anxiety or threat related word.
Classroom B: so that if you've already shifted your attention over to that word, and that's where the letter appears.
Classroom B: You do better.
Classroom B: You're already looking at it. So it's faster you don't have to. You get to skip that stage of figuring out where the letter appeared. And you're already looking at.
Classroom B: whereas people who score lower trade anxiety again tend to focus more or or be biased more towards the nonprofit group.
Classroom B: just in the same way that people who don't score high on depression or so score local on trade sadness will tend to fixate on the neutral or positive words instead of the
Classroom B: negative words.
Classroom B: thoughts, questions.
Classroom B: So we're we're sort of seeing some parallel patterns here, right? So like in in both cases, with moving memory effects on attention. If you if you either are experiencing a particular emotional state, or just have general predisposed high levels of that emotional trait. You tend to be biased towards processing information that is consistent with that emotional experience.
Classroom B: The we're seeing the sort of parallel difference here. The the major difference is sort of when in cognitive processing, like at which stages of cognitive processing
Classroom B: we, we had to see those multiple influences for moving through and memory. We don't really see any influence of anxiety, but we do see
Classroom B: and for attentional processes we see the the flip side of that we see another association
Classroom B: where we get these noticeable anxiety effects. You don't tend to get any effects associated with high praise depression, unless
Classroom B: the the only distinction here is unless you present those 2 words in the dock pro task for a longer period of time.
Classroom B: So there's more time spent processing it. And what this sort of suggests is that the the influences of anxiety on cognition are on sort of early stages of cognitive processes. They happen automatically, quickly.
Classroom B: and then it's only with a bit later processing, longer processing time. So we start to see
Classroom B: the status interaction.
Classroom B: So they they both influence cognition. It's on slightly different kind.
Classroom B: So the biofunk process that we we've identified as the emotions. And this is going to be influenced by both depression and anxiety is just general interpretive
Classroom B: processes and interpretation is often difficult to exam with that sort of control laboratory setting. But it's definitely important to our daily lives. We're often faced with ambiguous information.
Classroom B: you know. Maybe somebody, you know, we look at something, and they can.
Classroom B: They have a certain tone to their voice, or they're giving certain body language. That's ambiguous information, and we're trying to determine what that means.
Classroom B: We can interpret it in a positive way or a negative way.
Classroom B: they can interpret it correctly and incorrectly. We're gonna see is that there do tend to be these interpretational biases again, based on high trait levels of both depression, and
Classroom B: I
Classroom B: in a laboratory. One of the ways that you can examine this is by relying on things like homophones and homographs.
Classroom B: So a homophone is is. Are 2 words that
Classroom B: have the exact same phonology. So they they're pronounced the same way. They sound the same, but they're smelled differently for things.
Classroom B: When some of these early experiments on the emotional effects on interpretation very simple, the researcher would just read out verbally polyphones.
Classroom B: and the participant just has to write them down.
Classroom B: Now, if you can sort of select those homophones carefully.
Classroom B: you can demonstrate some interesting interpretational biases.
Classroom B: So yeah, like homophones like pain, which could be the experience, the negative experience of the sensation of pain or a window pain
Classroom B: die which could be dying clothing to make a different color, or somebody die as a death.
Classroom B: And what you tend to get is this very notable interpreter bias where people who score high on trait levels of anxiety or depression are much more likely to offer the negatively valanced spellings.
Classroom B: So even just at the basic level of hearing a word that could be interpreted in one of 2 ways. People experiencing anxiety and depression get drawn or biased towards the negative interpretation of that ambiguous information.
Classroom B: Now, this isn't just like a late stage selection bias. So like one of the concerns with this early research was that, well, like.
Classroom B: maybe what's happening is that people think about both spellings, and then sort of
Classroom B: lean towards one of them versus the other. But they're both accessible. But
Classroom B: further experimentation can dismiss that explanation of the pattern.
Classroom B: So the the other way to do this is, instead of using home bones. Use home of grass.
Classroom B: and these are words that are spelled the same, and often sound the same, but again, can mean different things.
Classroom B: And so a few examples of that are
Classroom B: the the word batter. Are we talking about like pancake batter, or we're talking about like a salted matter
Classroom B: or another example from the text.
Classroom B: You know, we, if we have a sentence like the Doctor Monitor Emily's growth. We're talking about a tight or a tour.
Classroom B: my biggest information, because the way that language, especially English works, we have these holographs, words that look the same, or spelled the same sound, the same, but mean more than one thing.
Classroom B: So the question becomes, okay, well, how do you experimentally in a controlled setting determine
Classroom B: whether somebody has an interpretation of bias towards one of those
Classroom B: meaning. It's either we we get something where it's either neutral or positively balanced, and then another interpretation is awly balanced, makes me like things are positive.
Classroom B: You don't really care about them. That it's neutral. Assault is negatively balanced. Height, neutral tumor negative.
Classroom B: So the the experiments that examine and demonstrate these interpretation biases are fairly clever because they they take advantage of a well known cockpit, and also known as crime.
Classroom B: It's something that we we've we would have discussed, I believe, some point earlier in the course I can't remember
Classroom B: when. But it's also probably something you would have encountered in other courses. What's the basic concept of
Classroom B: pets?
Classroom B: Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, Jared, I mean, essentially like what I'm what I'm asking here. So we've identified that we have these homographs so words that can be interpreted in in multiple ways
Classroom B: more than one meeting and then the goal is to within a laboratory experiment
Classroom B: assess or evaluate whether people scoring high in traffic, anxiety and depression are biased towards the negative interpretation. So the the original question was, Hey, how? How do we do that? And the final question that I ended with is just again seeing where everybody's backgrounds are based off of either the reading, the text or other courses. Is anyone familiar with the concept of.
Classroom B: So I mean, the the basic concept is is on a very general level, certainly that
Classroom B: when we have recently encountered information and encountered that information again, it's easier to process. We process it more fluently, more efficiently.
Classroom B: more more rapidly. And there are many experimental ways to demonstrate that idea, the one that becomes important here.
Classroom B: Yeah, we've got some stuff. Yeah, so a prime in psychology, implicit memory effect.
Classroom B: Yeah, so yeah, Jaren's identifying exactly what's going on here. So so following on that example. What I might do is give you something called a lexical decision task and a lexical decision task is, I'm going to show you either a word or a combination of letters that is pronounceable, but not actually word called a pronounceable non word. So I might give you something like
Classroom B: guys, I'm like, why
Classroom B: pronounceable combination of letters? But it's it doesn't correspond to an English word. So you'd say no to that. But then they give you actual English words, and and you say, yes so we get different forms of priming one of them. Using Jared's example. Let's say that I show you the word, doctor.
Classroom B: and then, like 10 trials later, I show you the word doctor again. Your response. Time to identifying doctor as a valid English word on the second trial will likely be faster. It'll take you less time.
Classroom B: called repetition. You see that information recently. So you process it faster the next time around
Classroom B: I've
Classroom B: building on Jared's example. You also get sort of semantic types of of processing. So I show you the word, doctor, and then 10 Travis waiter, I show you a word like Nurse Medicine Hospital, anything like that. And because those are semantically related, you're also show private faster to identify the semantically related word
Classroom B: that was related to something you saw previously.
Classroom B: and they're very reliable. They're very easy to demonstrate
Classroom B: that making sense any questions about that.
Classroom B: Okay, so the way we can leverage that priming procedure and that very reliable priming phenomenon is to give people some of the logical decision task. And this is exactly what researchers have done.
Classroom B: but what they use as primes
Classroom B: are these ambiguous homographs?
Classroom B: So at some point in that maximization task, you get the word matter.
Classroom B: or you can get it flashed immediately before a trial on a wessel decision task, and then you either get the word pancake or a salt.
Classroom B: and what this allows you to do is then measure the amount of priming that you get from that private
Classroom B: by measuring. Well, how much faster do people identify pancake? How much faster do people identify the salt?
Classroom B: That process making sense.
Classroom B: So based on our discussion, you can probably take a pretty good guess as to what happens when people are high on trainings at higher depression compared to people who are not.
Classroom B: You're gonna get more if you have. If you're low on depression, low and anxiety. You're gonna get a higher priming of flexible decision. You're gonna get a a larger speed up when you process pancake compared to whistle
Classroom B: that's going to flip around for people who score high on trade levels of depression and anxiety. We're there going to
Classroom B: show greater priming of lexical decision response time for assault compared to pancake.
Classroom B: And this gives us some pretty firm evidence about
Classroom B: how people were initially interpreting
Classroom B: that prime of batter.
Classroom B: Because, remember, we get these semantic priming effects where you you get priming for words that are related now, which word is related, or how strongly those 2 words are related to the prime of matter depends on how you interpret, or which meaning you get biased to words, or, better.
Classroom B: if you interpret it as salt, then you're going to get higher priming for assault. If you interpret it as related to pancakes, then you're going to get higher priming for pancakes.
Classroom B: You get the same thing with these sentences. So you show people a bunch of sentences like the doctor monitored Emily's growth. You're high on great levels of anxiety or profession. You're going to show higher priming for something like tumor compared to the word height.
Classroom B: Yeah?
Classroom B: Oh, that's a that's a good question. So so everyone's asking like, how many times you do this as a participant. You do it quite a few times it, of course, varies from from study to study. But I mean, you're gonna do at least a a few gossip trials at least.
Classroom B: Okay. So the the second suggestion there the follow up was, could your earlier responses influence later responses. That's certainly a concern
Classroom B: and that's a that's a very valid methodological concern. And and, Jared, I see some stuff coming from the chat. I will address it in just a second.
Classroom B: So yes, absolutely those those like you get these, you you're gonna get like sequential effects across any trial by trial experiment. The way that you tend to resolve, that is, by relying on the statistics of randomizing.
Classroom B: So you, you know, when you have these different trials never present them in a consistent order every single participant gets every single trial, it expands the order.
Classroom B: and that's how you avoid some of those those sequential effects that as long as you're sampling of, marked enough a reasonably large number of people that any sort of individual differences or any sequence effects tend to sort of balance and cancel.
Classroom B: That makes sense. Yeah, but but absolutely your breath. But I mean, if, like any experiment where you have all the all of the trials in the same order. It's like this is a bad experiment. Throw it in the garbage.
Classroom B: unless, of course, you're you're particularly interested in examining the ways that the order of trials, influences things.
Classroom B: Okay, we've got Jared asking, sounds like our emotions aren't really our emotions. They're manipulated. We so in this case, we're in this case, we're not actually doing much to change
Classroom B: emotions. Where, when we have people who tend to experience different emotion. This has an influence on our cognitive processing.
Classroom B: But we, we will very shortly get to these types of processes in which the way we think about things does influence our emotion.
Classroom B: And fortunately, the way that we can apply some of those finding
Classroom B: can often be much more positive rather than initiative. It's usually the the type of stuff we're gonna talk about is going to be at having people change their thought processes to reduce or eliminate things like anxiety
Classroom B: disorders.
Classroom B: Sharon, does that make sense
Classroom B: awesome?
Classroom B: Okay? So we've identified some key ways and some pretty reliable, strong empirical evidence suggesting that our our emotions, and especially sort of focusing, not exclusively but but but focusing primarily on trait emotional experiences.
Classroom B: and just examining how sort of different predisposition towards things like anxiety, depression can influence memory, attention, and
Classroom B: interpretation of ambiguous information.
Classroom B: Before we start to move over to the other side of that relationship? Any questions, clarifications, thoughts.
Classroom B: Okay?
Classroom B: So you know, we
Classroom B: emotions obviously included our cognitive processes. But there's also a good reason to think that our cognitive processes. And typically the way
Classroom B: evaluate and think about our own thoughts can also influence and shift around our our emotional experience.
Classroom B: So yeah, we have very early demonstrations of this of some classic 75. Lazarus.
Classroom B: what was the year of this?
Classroom B: So starting starting with last year, is 1982? Where where participants can come into a laboratory and watch like pretty like, you know, relatively disturbing videos that are like a pretty like gruesome like
Classroom B: work, accident, or something like that, like different sort of like gruesome, vibrant rituals. So videos that would, you know, for most people it would be like sort of produce unpleasant, negatively balanced, the waves of sort of stress anxiety discussed things like that
Classroom B: and
Classroom B: all Lazarus does is just give them sort of what they call like different different emotional scripts.
Classroom B: That you know, that encourages and and pushes people to think about the films in particular ways so one script, or one way of appraising or evaluating the film like what is. Watch the film and imagine it as if it's something that's actually happening.
Classroom B: This is kind of the way we're supposed that we have this idea of suspension. Just when we when we watch films and and television things like this.
Classroom B: you know, want to get a first in it or you give people a sort of appraisal script where you have you? You identify like, just imagine that this is like the, you know, for, like the ritual videos like this is, these are just actors who are depicting something for historical information or for the gruesome accidents like this is actors depicting something for the purpose of like a work safety video. They're just acting. Nobody's actually experiencing it thing. So you have these 2 different ways of appraising or evaluating the film.
Classroom B: And then, basically, no matter how you measure emotional response, you can measure it by self report.
Classroom B: One of the common measures of stress and anxiety is something called the organic skin response. If you're just, you're measuring sort of like a temperature and sweat changes on people's skin.
Classroom B: You could measure activity in the amiga. So that's that little part of the brain that is the primary ear anxiety center of the brain.
Classroom B: and no matter how you measure it, you get reduced emotional responses under those sort of actors, apprail scripts compared to imagine this is actually happening.
Classroom B: So a very clear demonstration that the way we think about something changes our emotional response to it.
Classroom B: If we're coming from the framework and imagine that these are just actors. Nothing bad actually happening. We don't respond in the same way as if we were imagining with something that actually happened.
Classroom B: So our our thoughts and our positive processes can very much influence our emotional responses
Classroom B: that make sense any questions about that.
Classroom B: This is a very good thing.
Classroom B: So as we identified earlier one of the issues with treating different psychological disorders and forms of psychological distress. Is this sort of cyclical problem.
Classroom B: We know that somebody who experiences depression tends to think about and focus on and be biased for negative information which just feeds further into their experiences of depression.
Classroom B: Anxiety can be the same way if you're rent. If you're like reminiscing on things that are stressful, that make you anxious, or you are biased towards interpreting things in ways that be that anxiety, like one of the examples of the tech, is like you're giving a presentation or a speech and people start laughing. You can interpret this as you said, something funny, or you can interpret is this, they're laughing at because you're doing a bad job
Classroom B: if you are an anxious person.
Classroom B: and you're biased towards interpreting that laughter as they're laughing at you.
Classroom B: Then that's just going to increase your levels of anxiety. Right? So in both cases we get these sort of like vicious circles.
Classroom B: outing.
Classroom B: feeding, cognitive cognitions and emotions into each other.
Classroom B: So the idea is that we can
Classroom B: change our thought processes or help people reappraise situations, change their thought processes. Then you could break that cycle and you could help people reduce or eliminate their viewings of anxiety and depression.
Classroom B: This is, in fact, the basic cornerstone of the therapeutic method of cognitive behavioral therapy or Cbt
Classroom B: which is essentially still like the gold standard, most reliable, effective, psychotherapeutic method to treat anxiety and depression disorders.
Classroom B: It's just there through dozens and dozens of very well-controlled, well conducted studies.
Classroom B: It's one of the most effective things that we have.
Classroom B: It's gonna be most effective in combination with medication.
Classroom B: But given given the 2, if you're going to have either medication or Cdt. See that, you know, with all the twins
Classroom B: depending on the disorder, it's not true for some things like Michael or disordered.
Classroom B: but in general Cbt. Is an extremely effective method
Classroom B: to change people's thoughts, and that that is the that's the idea, and have people reevaluate sort of push back against some of those automatic feedback loops that they have and have people reevaluate and reappraise their thought processes.
Classroom B: And if you do that.
Classroom B: you effectively treat and reduce depression and anxiety.
Classroom B: And I imagine the Cbt is a concept that we've that we've encountered before. Right?
Classroom B: Ashley is enthusiastically nodding.
Classroom B: Okay.
Classroom B: so what I want to do for the next little while before we take a break? Is the the textbook also outlines a couple of more recent methods of of using cognitive processing to change emotional states.
Classroom B: This is this this idea of Cbm or cognitive bias modification and they're they're interesting. We'll we'll see, of course, that the the evidence so far is mixed.
Classroom B: but there is some promise to them, and they even more directly take this idea of cognitive processing at a very fundamental level
Classroom B: like, you know, Cbt is kind of based on
Classroom B: very like narrative reappraisal about your own thought processes. And and Cbm is much more like very automatic, like trying to alter automatic, intentional and interpretative
Classroom B: processes.
Classroom B: So I'd like us to do just for the the next
Classroom B: 15 min or so as you as a group to sort of just discuss your understanding of of this this method of Cpm, talk about how it works. Once we're done that we'll take a break and we'll come back and you can. You can sort of
Classroom B: do your best to describe the process of Cpm. And we'll have a bit of discussion about that, and then we'll move on from there
Classroom B: that make sense
Classroom B: and pause the recording.
Classroom B: Okay? So
Classroom B: yeah, just walk me through the the sort of key ideas that you you got through as a group, and then we'll start to fill in some.
Ashley Wray: We just touched on how there's 2 types of Cbm, Cbm a. And Cbm I and Cbma is focused towards attention and
Ashley Wray: brings participants away from negative.
Ashley Wray: So let me double check my notes here. Negative information while Cbm is interpretation.
Ashley Wray: And it interprets ambiguous information in either negative or positive manner, and both are
Ashley Wray: much quicker processes than Cbt.
Classroom B: Yeah, okay, so yeah, those are, those are, yeah, definitely, some some critical points. So the couple of things I wanna go in and and discuss does does anyone feel like they have? These idea sort of how the how that modification process works like. So when, after you say, like, draw attention away from negative information? How does that work? How how does the process actually act.
Ashley Wray: Would it be similar to what we were discussing before, about exposing participants to neutral simuli as opposed to negative
Ashley Wray: and priming them with
Ashley Wray: neutral or positive stimuli.
Classroom B: You're you okay? You're you're close but the the difference is that you don't exclusively provide with neutral and positive valence stimuli. You still give the negative stimuli, but you adapt the
Classroom B: procedure to sort of bias people away from the negative information and positive information. And what's sort of interesting about these processes is like the the therapy, like how the process actually works is essentially having people practice those weird laboratory experiments that we were discussing and and demonstrating. So I just have like, really, you know.
Classroom B: crew root of entry
Classroom B: breakdown for some of those steps and processes, so on on the web. We consider that, you know.pro task. So remember, this is, you get a fixation 2 words and then in one of those 2 positions, you get a letter or some process, and identify as quickly as possible.
Classroom B: We were noting that people who are high on great anxiety, tend to over, fixate or be biased toward information.
Classroom B: So the goal is to change that procedure to shift attention away. And the way that you do that is, you just set it up so that the letter nearly always appears with the neutral or positive information. So let's say that 90% of the time letter is going to appear
Classroom B: under forest compared to death.
Classroom B: You do this over time. The you know, the the goal is to perform and increase your performance and and
Classroom B: increase your processing speed.
Classroom B: As you know as much as possible. So as long as you you have people sufficiently motivated to sort of do better and improve their performance. Then, I mean, what's the optimal strategy you could
Classroom B: paying attention, do the non negative information.
Classroom B: Like, if you're just guessing statistically, it's like, well, 90% of the time the letter's going to be there. So I should focus my attention there. It's only one note of 10 times, and I have to
Classroom B: lose that speed to shift over to the other side. So
Classroom B: I focus here.
Classroom B: So you're you're introducing something into the procedure where, if participants want to optimize their performance, their best strategy is to focus on
Classroom B: control or positive information instead of the negative information
Classroom B: that make sense.
Classroom B: Same thing with this interpretational side. So this is the, this is Cbm a. This is the attentional
Classroom B: side of things.
Classroom B: If we want to do the same thing in modifying people's interpretation. Wow! Let's give them those same types of priming tasks with these, you know, ambiguous words.
Classroom B: But now, we're gonna do a different type of task instead of flexible decision. You might, you're gonna get what's called a word fragment completion task. So you get something like this. So you see Banner as a prime, and then you get you know Pd, blank and Ca. Blank, what the person supposed to do is as quickly inaccurate as possible. Just type in the first missing letter.
Classroom B: What you're doing here is like, of course, like the the only way that you can possibly validly completes that word prank spilling into missing letters is pancake.
Classroom B: So you're essentially forcing people to process matter in the context of pancake or additive matter in the context of the salt.
Classroom B: And again, you do this over time with many different examples.
Classroom B: So in both cases, you're just, you're essentially pushing people's responses and and behavior and biases away from that naturally negative balance and information which we identify going to be harmful and incremental and forcing that bias in the opposite direction.
Classroom B: That procedure make sense.
Classroom B: And what we end up seeing is that there, there is some evidence. It's mixed evidence but there is some evidence that as people go through these processes on a sort of like regular basis over the period of a few weeks
Classroom B: we can in some cases find that this ends up with lower levels of trait anxiety
Classroom B: great depression.
Classroom B: so it can effectively reduce those detrimental, harmful methods or ways of thinking.
Classroom B: Again, it's it's mixed. There are some, you know, some studies and some analyses fail to find a reliable reduction and anxiety and depression, but others
Classroom B: do find a reliable reduction and anxiety depression. So you know, we're not at the point where you should just say, Okay, everybody should start doing them if they're experiencing depression. But it is suggested it shows some promise, and and I would say that the next direct go is to identify differences between the studies that do and do not find benefits and try to identify. Hey, what are the optimal ways to use this type of technique?
Classroom B: And if we can then identify a sort of adaptive version that leads to reliable
Classroom B: improvements in in anxiety and depression. Then I think we have reason to value this type of contribution.
Classroom B: So the question, then, of course, I mean, you've already identified one of these points. But there are
Classroom B: reasons
Classroom B: to emphasize something like Cbm over something like Cbt, because, of course, the the critical question becomes like, Well, why do we need Cbm, we have Cbt and we know that it works.
Classroom B: So why wouldn't we just stick to that?
Classroom B: You identified one reason to also include Cbm.
Classroom B: do we do? We have an idea of what? What you've identified as that reason.
Classroom B: actually. And Jared both identified it.
Classroom B: That's a different one. So if I'm saying you can do it yourself, that's gonna be a big one.
Classroom B: But once I identified what actually Jared identifies, and it hits the take last time.
Classroom B: So it's it's less of a time commitment. But what Elon's identifying is that you don't need a therapist.
Classroom B: You can do it yourself
Classroom B: as long as you're good at maintaining a good schedule.
Classroom B: Now for me, that's even more critically important than the the time. Because it's not that that big difference, you know, like the
Classroom B: 13 weeks versus 8 weeks.
Classroom B: Why, in our, in our practical constraints of our social structures right now, why is it important, or why would I think it's critically important that this can be done on your own without
Classroom B: therapist.
Classroom B: Why might that be important within our current practical constraints?
Ashley Wray: Maybe because some people have difficulty asking for help.
Classroom B: Yeah, that could be. That could be part of it. That's not, that's all. What I have in mind as an excellent point, you know some people are reluctant to see a therapist
Classroom B: because they don't want to ask for help. They don't want to go through that process so they might be more likely to
Classroom B: got
Classroom B: to participate this kind of treatment. That's yeah. That's certainly an excellent point.
Classroom B: Sorry in our
Classroom B: there are not enough therapists. Yeah. So there are. There are cognitive behavioral therapy programs that you can get a referral to from your doctor in Manitoba.
Classroom B: and the
Classroom B: wait list is usually over a year
Classroom B: related to that.
Classroom B: The wait list for those you know subsidized or free programs is is far too long. You can go to a therapist. You'll find a psychologist
Classroom B: opinion wise.
Classroom B: I mentioned this before that in in Manitoba the recommended rate by the Canadian Psychological Association for a clinical psychologist is $215 for 15 min, 5 0, the 10 min under an hour, $215.
Classroom B: I have
Classroom B: excellent insurance.
Classroom B: If coverage through booth coverage, through my my wife's work.
Classroom B: Our coverage in a year would not even come close
Classroom B: to covering a typical
Classroom B: Cbt program.
Classroom B: and we have better coverage than most people. We're very fortunate.
Classroom B: Tbm doesn't need a therapist, which means
Classroom B: it could. As long as somebody is willing to to develop the software, develop an app could be free.
Classroom B: It's not not a difficult process. We've we've encountered these same types of ideas before. We have these automated training things to talk about. The context of working memory training or older at all.
Classroom B: It would take, like a
Classroom B: probably relatively, you know, high performing.
Classroom B: high school student in a computer science class
Classroom B: program the type of app.
Classroom B: Certainly any like university student who majors in computer science could do it
Classroom B: doesn't need across the day.
Classroom B: Okay, yeah. Jared's introducing this for idea, addressing idea like, when you have this like, you have, like this virtual intelligence, you have these AI systems that are that are
Classroom B: sort of made leaps and bounds and language processing. So you have these like virtual
Classroom B: virtual people that you could talk to
Classroom B: definitely promising for the future, I would be as a psychologist, very reluctant to suggest that you use these AI systems for therapy point, because even with very basic tap.
Classroom B: they make errors.
Classroom B: They're often correct.
Classroom B: But they also make mistakes.
Classroom B: and
Classroom B: you don't want to make mistakes when you are treating somebody who's dealing with those things want to move forward.
Classroom B: That's that's at least mine. I don't. I don't think they're up to
Classroom B: the the say, the necessary level to actually provide
Classroom B: to all the certificates.
Classroom B: Oh, yeah. So I mean the the term artificial. I mean, all, all artificial intelligence means at this point is that it's it's
Classroom B: not produced by a biological organism. That's what we will mean by artificial intelligence that it's programmed into
Classroom B: any other thoughts, ideas, questions.
Classroom B: Yes.
Classroom B: Okay. So for the people on Zoom, one's question is like. So everything, all, all the like. The methods we've been talking about are sort of. They're visually oriented, and the question is, Well, can you do things auditorally the one clarification. So Cbt, because it's it's a very different technique is like Marty purple. It's like it's the the way that you're that you learn to reappraise your your emotions and your thought processes through conversation.
Classroom B: Which is why you require the therapist to to help with that process.
Classroom B: but you're you're correct. So the things that we've identified so far are visual.
Classroom B: I don't think there's any reason that you couldn't do it using sound. You just have to change the procedures. But, like the the general idea of of cognitive bias automation is that you have some sort of simple task
Classroom B: where you have, either neutral or positive and and negatively valuance information. And you do something where they have to fill out. People have to perform a task in a way that draws their attention away from the negative
Classroom B: or the name.
Classroom B: So yeah, I mean, if you you could creatively design different types of houses that rely on tap rather than vision.
Classroom B: And of course that'd be important, for example, to be
Classroom B: Cbm in its current forms ought to be terribly useful for somebody as a pandemic.
Classroom B: Yeah. So there's nothing. It doesn't have to be visual. It's just that's that's what's been tested so far.
Classroom B: we've also I mean as the text notes. We also have virtually no research on whether you get
Classroom B: who's causing the bias modification. For example, the context of moving through in memory.
Classroom B: I I have no reason to believe that wouldn't see parallel patterns. It's just a matter of determining. Okay, what can you do in typical.
Classroom B: simple memory task.
Classroom B: I did
Classroom B: moves, you know, every
Classroom B: to improve positive information. Does anyone have any speculations or or brainstorming ideas of how might do that
Classroom B: like if you gave people a memory task, what what could you do to draw attention away from negative information?
Classroom B: I wasn't
Classroom B: one procedure that's coming to mind whether there, of course, could be many more.
Classroom B: This this one, I would say, I just wanna check for background and all it is. This is one of the ones where I'd say you probably are. Otherwise we've encountered this much in other courses. But does anyone
Classroom B: encounter the experimental procedure of directed forgetting?
Classroom B: Yeah. Didn't didn't think so. I'm you know. I'm probably the only person that would talk about it, and I don't think I've ever talked. It's it's an interesting experiment with the procedure. It's
Classroom B: you you give people information to remember.
Classroom B: but you also instruct them on some of the information that actually, I want you to forget. So that's what we might directly forget. So it's like, I'll show you a word and say, once you remember this one, I'll show you another word, and I'll say
Classroom B: I don't want to remember this one. I want to forget this one.
Classroom B: and it seems weird. It's like, Well, I'm showing you the information. Can you actually forget it?
Classroom B: And and then it's tricky to measure whether people actually forgot or or were worse at remembering that information, because, of course, if you
Classroom B: just give them like a memory test they could. If they want to perform well, they could very easily be like, well, I do remember this word, but I also remember they told me to forget it, so I'm not going to say that I remember it, but they want to do well.
Classroom B: So what you do is you trick people you give them this, these directly forgetting instructions. And then, after that, you say just kidding. I actually want you to remember all of them, and then give them a memory test where they still try to remember the words you told them to forget.
Classroom B: And what you find is that memory people's memory for those words that we're told to forget is, in fact, worse. They are less likely to remember the information that you instructed them to forget.
Classroom B: So it suggests that we actually do have some control over those encoding and storage processes. People debate about exactly why, but
Classroom B: for our purposes. Here.
Classroom B: Jared, the the procedure is called a directed forgetting
Classroom B: procedure.
Classroom B: you know, as the researcher, I direct you to either remember or forget information.
Classroom B: Yeah, so it does. But for heart purposes just that like, well, if you want to develop some sort of simple memory procedure.
Classroom B: that you could build into an app for a piece of software fairly easily. You could do a directive forgetting.
Classroom B: And it just you. You buy this thing so that you say, forget on all the negatively bandwidth words, and say remember, on all the positive and different words
Classroom B: which would presumably, or at least theoretically, over time. Cause people's like memory encoding
Classroom B: to be biased towards positive and neutral information.
Classroom B: Realize that very good offices, idea
Classroom B: any other thoughts, questions, any other ways that you could think of like modifying memory processes in these these 5 modification
Classroom B: frameworks
Classroom B: being conscious of time. Let's let's shift gears then, because we all we do have another topic to discuss.
Classroom B: And like, I'm not gonna discuss the the
Classroom B: second chapter for this week. And I did a complete detail, focus it a little bit selectively. But the general idea
Classroom B: the other idea that we've we've read about and we'll discuss today, is
Classroom B: who is somewhat related to the idea of emotion in some sense, but the idea of music. And specifically there. There is a sub field of research that focuses on the cognition of music
Classroom B: which could mean a few different things. So this could be, for example, the cognitive processes that are associated with the ability to learn about school expertise and what are the cognitive processes that are required for somebody to learn to play musical instruments to a certain level efficiency.
Classroom B: But what I was sort of been our kind focusing on today is just a more general problem of like, what are the cognitive processes that allow us to. You know.
Classroom B: understand, interpret and experience music on an aesthetic level, and the one of the connections here, like one of the one of the sort of
Classroom B: clear connections between where music and emotion.
Classroom B: they set emotional responses. If a specific topic has emotional content to it.
Classroom B: I'm
Classroom B: the other connection is that much like emotion and potentially specific emotions. Music seems to be. That's universal.
Classroom B: you know. It's it like
Classroom B: music is a major part of many people's lives. You know, some more than others, you know. Some people, of course, spend much of their time listening to and playing music but, like most people.
Classroom B: hear or listen to at least some music
Classroom B: every day.
Classroom B: Does anyone like? Does anyone remember the last time they went through a day without hearing any music?
Classroom B: Actually, yes, but no, but I I certainly don't. I mean, that's a conscious choice on on my part. But it's also universal in the sense that, like there
Classroom B: no known culture whether it existing or or in the past. That didn't have to use it. Even in our evolutionary history we have anthropological evidence that, even like very, very, very early. Humans and
Classroom B: human ancestors
Classroom B: add even rudimentary musical instruments.
Classroom B: So it seems to be something really universal about us as humans.
Classroom B: So
Classroom B: from from a cognitive perspective. Like the
Classroom B: we're, we're gonna sort of draw back upon a few concepts that we have earlier. Of course, when we discuss the the part of the processes of this general auditory perception and all the processing. But the the ability to recognize, understand, experience, derive tighter from
Classroom B: and interpret music. Does you know, it seems like almost necessarily require a a complex coordination of a large number of cognitive processes.
Classroom B: So we have here is just a sort of basic depiction of the different stages of of useful processing that we might have to go to when we're listening to and understanding song or understanding music. It's it's working from from up, starting at the very basic processes and understanding how they they find and pickled up. But but as the taxes like talk down influences. So our experiences matter as well.
Classroom B: But this is just a sort of basic diagrammatic
Classroom B: depiction of of the things that we need to do to begin to perceive and understand music.
Classroom B: So just like a a few points to highlight. And then we could just sort of open up discussion about, you know, we're sort of introspective on our own audit of processes and our own, how they they relate to our own experiences with music. So as as I was noted, like useful processing at the very basic level. Just the process of actually sensing sound organized, perceptual combinations. This is, of course, going to
Classroom B: rely on many of the same processes that just undermine any any authority processing.
Classroom B: And it has additional levels like we have. Of course, we interpret music through through the sensory organs of the year. We've discussed some of the basic perceptual components of sound pitch which relates to the frequency of a sound wave loudness which corresponds to the amplitude of that wave at at Tomer tone which corresponds to the relationship of of a fundamental frequency. And it and it's overtones or upper harmonics.
Classroom B: Do we need any refresher on any of that stuff, or is that seeming familiar enough?
Classroom B: Don't think
Classroom B: so.
Classroom B: even even at this stage.
Classroom B: the the challenge or task of perceiving and processing musical information introduces some some unique challenges, very more typical onboard processing. So like right now, you're needing to get an auditory process. Ask? I'm saying things
Classroom B: is everyone's hearing it in the direct sound waves that are bouncing around the room. Everyone else on Zoom is hearing that information defined by a microphone, and then
Classroom B: your own personal speakers. And right now you're essentially listening to one thing
Classroom B: there are other background noises going out. But we know we have fairly effective attentional processes. So you ignore those things and you have to process, the one sort of auditory signal of what I am saying.
Classroom B: With that in mind, what seems to be one of the what? What can you sort of infer as one of the unique challenges of processing physical information.
Classroom B: What's what are some of the ways in which processing musical information differs from the auditory path. So, for example, processing what somebody is saying.
Classroom B: if they're saying aesthetics, we will get to that. That's even like that's even like way higher up. So the aesthetic barges like, we're still just looking at these challenges of perceiving musical information at the the stage to perceptual level. It's not even until we get to that very high, like emotional interaction where we start to look at aesthetics and things like that. But you're correct. I mean, that is something that is unique, like there's we don't really describe any sort of particular aesthetic quality to
Classroom B: somebody's voice during a class or a lecture, whereas music, of course, like, that's one of the components of music compared to staff. So, too.
Classroom B: basic components are like, it's sort of minimal requirements. Music is that there's some sort of deliberate organization of sound, with the aim of producing some sort of aesthetic value or experience.
Classroom B: So, Darren, you're correct, but we will. We'll put that in our back pocket for now.
Classroom B: So if anybody feels like volunteer, what's a particular like artist or band, or or even just song that you've been into recently.
Classroom B: if anybody's comfortable sharing.
Classroom B: Okay? Well, then, I'll I'll pick an example and let's just let's just go with with popular opinion. Not really my cup of tea. But you know Taylor Swift has had the biggest year of her entire career. So why don't we? Why don't we use that as a very simple example. If you go to a Taylor swift sponsor, if you don't, just
Classroom B: everyone so doesn't just stand there in front of a microphone annotate.
Classroom B: He has a guitar. There are a bunch of other people in the band like different instruments. So one of the unique challenges of perceiving music is that there's
Classroom B: always like are more than just one
Classroom B: auditory signal that you were processing. You were processing, and many different things that combine
Classroom B: to us on.
Classroom B: So even at this very basic perceptual level.
Classroom B: One of the major auditory challenges that your brain faces when you're listening to music, is separating out those different auditory signals separating out like which sounds are coming, from which instruments
Classroom B: which musical components are coming, from which instruments.
Classroom B: And of course we don't think about that as being difficult because it's not hard for us.
Classroom B: but the actual just task, like analyzing it from a sort of like computational level, analyzing from the perspective of like, what does our brain need to do
Classroom B: to perform that task with like perceptual separation of different instruments?
Classroom B: It's very difficult
Classroom B: up.
Classroom B: Karen is describing, listening to Taylor swift as a spiritual experiences that past the boundaries of physics. You might be saying so. Fishing I don't know for sure, like I said, not my type of. But that's one of the interesting aspects of the aesthetics, right? That everybody has their own.
Classroom B: you know their own experiences with with different types of music.
Classroom B: But there is something like at least at the very basic like lower foundational, cognitive levels. There is some sort of like psychophysical thing going on and one of the ways that we tend to. So like, you know, one of the ways that we distinguish between different instruments and different sounds is through its total ball, just like as of those changes in upper harmonics and overtones.
Classroom B: And as we mentioned, we're discussing auditory processing the patterns of attack in the cave. You know, things like a guitar, a piano, a trumpet, a voice, a a stare drum, a bass drum. They all have different total qualities.
Classroom B: even if they're playing the same fundamental frequency at the same volume.
Classroom B: So that helps us.
Classroom B: and at at a relatively simplistic level. If we think back to these sort of just stalk principles that allow us to organize our perceptual information. Remember that one of the big ones is similarity.
Classroom B: We perceive things as belonging to the same perceptual signal in this case, same auditory signal, if they're similar to each other. So one of the ways that we can distinguish between different instruments, different signals, different people's voices is through the different sounds they're producing over a sequence of time
Classroom B: being similar in total.
Classroom B: We also rely on, for example, cues and similarity in pitch. So we have. If we bring this down to more control laboratory experiments, for example, we know that if we play 2 distinct melodies to people.
Classroom B: It's easier for people to distinguish between or separate those 2 melodies if they're in essentially different registers. So if they're if they're distant in pitch.
Classroom B: So you have 2 different melodies, one of them quite high, one of them quite low. It's not terribly difficult for us to distinguish between them, because we could rely on on frequency or pitch-based similarity to determine which one is which, whereas if they're very close to each other, that becomes difficult because
Classroom B: they're in them, in and of themselves. They're similar to each other, which makes it difficult to separate because we tend to group things based on similarities.
Classroom B: We remember some of the other. Just all organizational principles in in perception
Classroom B: broken.
Classroom B: The the similarity edge idea is, I mean, it's it.
Classroom B: It's probably the the reasons for it are probably not recognized within sort of like Federal preschool profession communities, but it's definitely at least a like, tacitly or implicitly recognize and acknowledge, like good composers, good, sound engineers good musicians when they're supervising the other will be mindful separation
Classroom B: of of pitch across different musical ideas across different instruments.
Classroom B: And a musician who's improvising with other people. One of the key skills that you need is to listen to what other people are doing
Classroom B: and adapt or playing, so that you're not playing within the same general area of notice.
Classroom B: Because if we start to do that, then the 2 different musical ideas that you are both trying to express and play, get confuse and and bottled up together
Classroom B: to try to keep those
Classroom B: do the same thing. Proposals do the same thing.
Classroom B: They just don't necessarily know that they're doing this. And it's effective because of the just all principles of of similarity based organization.
Classroom B: We think back to some of those other organizational principles. We know that proximity matters as well.
Classroom B: and this seems kind of odd, because you know, most of the time. If we're like watching a man.
Classroom B: sound is coming out of of speakers, or if we're listening to music unless headphones
Classroom B: source. But
Classroom B: you know you can. You can try this at some time on your on your own time. Use like your phones or or headphones
Classroom B: and pay attention to where different sounds and Instagram are located across your 2 years. Because sound engineers know that proximity, and it's at spatial locations help us to distinguish between sounds as well.
Classroom B: and in particular, go try to depending on the type of music that you enjoy listening to ideally. Go try to find some sort of recording or or band that has 2 guitarists.
Classroom B: They play different parts at the same time.
Classroom B: and usually you'll notice, if you have decent quality headphones, that you'll have one guitar in one ear and the other guitar in the other ear.
Classroom B: because otherwise they're they're often difficult to distinguish right because they have similar sounds.
Classroom B: But that's a very just standard sound engineering technique to place different instruments in different ears.
Classroom B: to allow you to to more effectively allow you to perceptually distinguish between those efforts.
Classroom B: making sense any questions about that
Classroom B: recording methods and and sound engineers can do all sorts of weird, interesting things just with my plane.
Classroom B: with a relationship between 2 sides of a stereo signal, such as headphones or multiple speakers again, thought. Most of them aren't aware of
Classroom B: perceptual or offer the processes that allow those tricks to work, but they know how to.
Classroom B: For example, you have like panic effects where it sounds like something is like moving behind you in a song and that's just taking advantage of a relative shift from one ear to the other, because it's taking advantage of one of the ways that we I vocalize sound.
Classroom B: I mean, one of the ways that we identify. Location of a sound is by difference in signal between the 2 ears.
Classroom B: We move up to that next stage where we start to take some of those like what we might consider kind of like basic auditory characteristics like pitch, loudness and and timber we start to, you know, one of the other challenges that we face in music is now organizing because it's different physical components or different physical ideas.
Classroom B: And if we're sort of simplify and add, like the 3 basic components that we have to process this point are are melodies, rhythms, and so melody the the you know, the relationship between different notes that are occurring in a sequence
Classroom B: rhythm, the timing with which those notes are are coming to us, and harmony. This is where we start to be in 2 combinations of different notes that might be occurring at the same time.
Classroom B: So we have to take those different signals
Classroom B: that, we're processing those individual notes and process them and organize them or group them into a lot of structures, rhythmic structures, harmonic structures.
Classroom B: and some of the ways that we do this do again rely on just all principles. They're just iterating up in different cities of complexity. But this is where we start to get an even larger contribution from things like culture experience.
Classroom B: types of of music that we're familiar with.
Classroom B: And there's an interesting demonstration of the what we might have sort of based on our experiences based on our our culture, based on our our musical background. We often tend to organize these musical components
Classroom B: based on on coherence and familiarity. So we tend to group different sounds into structures and sequences that make sense to us, based on the musical information that we've encountered in the past.
Classroom B: We're looking at an example of of that here. So this is a a now, you know, well known experiment. And and the basic idea is that you have headphones on as a participant. And and what we're seeing at the top. Here is just a depiction of what each year of of your headphones is receiving.
Classroom B: And what you're getting is a sort of like these notes jumping in
Classroom B: seemingly unpredictable patterns. What was actually happening is just you have, you have 2 sequences, a descending scale
Classroom B: in in blue and in ascending scale in porn. So the scale is going down. Scale is going up. But what's happened in the actual production of the signal is that those 2 scales are alternating between your. So what you're right here is hearing is, you know, a bad thing.
Classroom B: Opt down, up, down. Whoever is hearing, down, opt down, up.
Classroom B: and
Classroom B: surprisingly. What you don't hear is that sort of unpredictable, you know, notes bouncing up and down. That's what each individual here is receiving what you end up. Hearing is
Classroom B: 2 sequences.
Classroom B: You hear a descending scale, you hear a descending scale, and you hear them happening simultaneously, and you essentially group, those together
Classroom B: based on similarity, based on what you understand, and is something that is musically coherent.
Classroom B: because, as I think of these heading scales are fairly common, whereas notes that jump around like that aren't. We don't tend to hear that very often. So we group it based into something that's familiar, sensible.
Classroom B: and what we end up hearing is, we often don't even recognize that the notes are alternating between our 2 years. We this year scale going down
Classroom B: a scale. Don't we have
Classroom B: now, if we start to consider the the complexity of recognizing melodies, rhythms, harmonies we, we can see that it quickly becomes a very difficult perceptual task. So just like a a couple of examples other people can
Classroom B: provide, and brainstorm ideas if they come to mind. I was imagine just the useful tasks, something that we haven't necessarily thought of deliberately, but something that we, our brains, do when we listen to most common songs, a very common thing that will happen as a song
Classroom B: is one instrument or a voice. The one auditory signal will be playing a melody, and then another auditory signal will be playing a harmony. On top of that we have 2 different signals. The different tonal quality is played by different instruments.
Classroom B: Now let's just think about
Classroom B: the cognitive complexity of recognizing
Classroom B: that this instrument is playing a sequence of notes.
Classroom B: and this insert is playing a sequence of notes that is not the same as what is related to or follow a similar structure.
Classroom B: Similar melodic structure, a similar rhythmic structure, but in a different with different pitches.
Classroom B: and then, taking those 2 streams, recognizing that they're simultaneously separate, but related to each other.
Classroom B: They're not playing the same notes, so they're not similar in pitch.
Classroom B: They're not similar in total quality. They're probably somewhat similar in volume, but the general level of volume across
Classroom B: auditory signals in a typical recording or in a typical band are pretty consistent. So with very limited variability that doesn't really provide us with a way of distinguishing. So the only way that you can recognize that relationship and keep them distinct, is by processing and perceiving some sort of larger, more quality structure.
Classroom B: by recognizing that they're both playing a melody for lack of a better word, playing a sequence of notes that have a similar shape.
Classroom B: even though they're they're starting at different points.
Classroom B: They're playing in the same rhythm
Classroom B: again, despite playing different notes.
Classroom B: Analyzing the task in that way demonstrates that it's extremely complicated, and we don't even have to think about it. Right?
Classroom B: So like, for me, the most interesting thing about this this third stage of processing is that we move away from just like raw, absolute auditory information. And we start to now relate to more like more structure groupings, organizations.
Classroom B: So again, I'm not. I'm not going to ask for, for example. But if you think about your favorite song doesn't like. Does anyone here have absolute pitch.
Classroom B: like the ability to hear a note and determine exactly which note it is.
Classroom B: That's uncommon. I don't either. So what that means is that, like most of us don't really care like if we hear a song, and it's in a different key. It's not like we have trouble recognizing.
Classroom B: That's all right.
Classroom B: You go. Let's say you go pure a band, and it's like a cover of a song, you know, like you're not even gonna you're probably not even gonna know whether they're playing in that same key as the original recording or the original artist.
Classroom B: And you're certainly not going to have any difficulty recognizing the song.
Classroom B: And you can like, you can actually have pretty substantial deviations from the original song
Classroom B: without losing your ability to recognize it so you could take like a song. That was David. Maybe it's like a dance cup tube that has like
Classroom B: it's all electronic synthesize instruments, you know, big like drum and base kind of thing. You go to a lounge. If you're somebody played on an acoustic piano, you're not gonna have difficulty recognizing it.
Classroom B: even though the actual similarity in sound signals like there's no overlap.
Classroom B: we very automatically and effortlessly recognize the basic physical structures that make up a song.
Classroom B: Yeah. So Darren's providing you a concrete example. So money for nothing. Yeah, I think I'm I'm vaguely familiar with that that phenomenon. And like they have a they have a riff in the in the song. It's a very popular, Riff. I can't think of it off it off my head right now, but I do know what you're talking about. And it's like.
Classroom B: Yup, the guitarist is like, I I don't. I don't remember how to how to do this. I don't really know what I did when I recorded.
Classroom B: But you can play something that, like people still recognize as the song. So it's not exact. And that's another like. That's another general phenomenon. We think so. One of the experiments discussed in the chapter is they bring participants in and they play them like a a unfamiliar phone melody. They've selected the song so that they're like, not really the types of sort of like melodic structures that we're typically securing. And the goal is just to have people like try to try their best to sing the the melody back.
Classroom B: and in terms of perfect replication, that nobody, nobody gets it even after trying like 6, 7, 8 times even, who have
Classroom B: good musical background. It's difficult for them to repeat back that melody. Don't forward notes.
Classroom B: but it's also not the case that they just like can't do anything. What they sing back ends up being something that's like the general structure. The general gist
Classroom B: of the melody. It's just not known for no current.
Classroom B: Yeah. So we're good at recognizing these structures, and they are very much like there's nothing. There's nothing inherent about those musical structures, because, of course, different cultures have different music and have in many cases very different melodic rhythm and and harmonic.
Classroom B: structures embedded into their music. So, for example, consider like typical Western music versus like Indian music.
Classroom B: it's like, I mean, we use as entirely different scales.
Classroom B: very, very old, like ancient Chinese music. There's a lot of evidence discussing that they started on a client don't scale.
Classroom B: So even the the notes and melodies that we recognize and use within our different useful structures. We call the culture.
Classroom B: And then, if we get to that that final stage, so the the much more difficult stage to sort of articulate and describe psychologically is that that emotional and aesthetic
Classroom B: aspect of so like once, we recognize all these structures. Grouping like most for most people like listening to a piece of music is not just like a sort of like.
Classroom B: It's it's not like an animal. It's not gonna be an analytic like academic app. Right? It's it's like we we experience. And we have a motion that responds to it. There's a certain aesthetic value to music into a song
Classroom B: and that gets, of course, difficult to examine, especially from a cognitive perspective. But there are some aspects of of cognitive processes that do at least seem to play a role
Classroom B: in. In our experience of of oceans that aesthetics will listen to.
Classroom B: there are some.
Classroom B: There are some characteristics of of melodies and harmonies and rhythms and things like that that do at least somewhat reliably map onto different emotional experiences. Again based, like dependence, at least partially on on culture. So, for example, in Western music, most of the time, like major scales, are are perceived as sounding like sort of happy positive with minor scales.
Classroom B: But this is like, I'd say, the the biggest place at which the biggest point at which experience
Classroom B: batteries.
Classroom B: So just like, you know.
Classroom B: relatively anecdotal example. But I think it's, you know this is a consistent enough experience for people that it does move beyond
Classroom B: anticode
Classroom B: any. Many people, I think. Probably most people have at least one song that is, by all accounts sound.
Classroom B: you know. Hierarchy is that lyrical content? But they, you know, we've often we probably have at least one sad song. That we, through our memory processes, have associated with a very positive experience. Positive event.
Classroom B: please, when you hear that song, like the emotion that is going to elicit, is positively influenced. Happy emotion, even though it's terms of its structure in terms of its content. Outside of our own subjective experience.
Classroom B: I certainly have a lot of examples of that
Classroom B: our experience and our memory adder. And you know some of the information outlined in the chapter.
Classroom B: We have these interesting parallels between our our like reminiscence bumps in auto, biographical memory, and similar types of reminiscence bumps in our musical preference.
Classroom B: then want to remember what the reminiscent spump is. An autobiographical memory.
Annie Lewis: Isn't it? When you generally remember things from your you're like younger years, admissive use.
Classroom B: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that is exactly correct. Right? If you have, people recall events from their lives, we get a kind of boost or a bump to events from what we might call our sort of formative year. So starting adolescence sort of like early adulthood of the the range, you know 16 to be a little bit lower, sort of like lower adolescence to like 30
Classroom B: depending on the person
Classroom B: we see something similar in in musical preference. So it's like when when an older generation says things like, I just don't like the music that kids listen to today. Part of that is a reminiscent spot, the music, the muse, the songs that we prefer, the songs that we tend to wish, as our favorite songs are disproportionately from that sort of like wave adolescence, early adulthood for the year stage.
Classroom B: This sort of feeling, this idea, you know, this sensation or experience of using being like pissed out.
Classroom B: And it's likely, because it's probably tied to some of those positive autobiographical memories.
Classroom B: Yeah, you can introspect on your own musical preferences and like realize that there's probably quite a bit of this like I. I do like a lot of newer sick. But if I think about all my favorite artists and favorite bands I encountered them sometime in my late teens and early twenties
Classroom B: through many, many people.
Classroom B: Now, what's interesting one thing that's like really sort of unique about reminiscence bumps for musical preference compared to autobiographical memories, is you? You can observe these sort of interesting generational
Classroom B: effects. It's almost like a a reminiscence bump musical preference inheritance effect. Because you get what the what researchers in the technical call cascading remedy bumps. So you get this reminiscence bump in musical preference for things that you encountered in your formative years, late twenties but then you also can observe,
Classroom B: previous preference for songs that would have been released when your parents were in that age range, and sometimes even your band.
Classroom B: So it's like you are like, you're passing on these useful experiences preferences like, down for generations across your family. And again, it's likely it's likely
Classroom B: still, like we do to exposure to some degree. You know, you
Classroom B: hear a lot of music that parents listen to.
Classroom B: As of the remnants bump in their musical preference, they're more likely listening to songs from their late twenties, so they're more likely to hear those songs.
Classroom B: I I have very fond memories of people like, say, my grandparents house, you know, drinking Scott and listing digit hat
Classroom B: and all the jazz artists I like, or all the all my grandpa's favorites jazz artists, because those are the ones he played.
Classroom B: Yeah. So this is, this is very obviously like close connection between you know, using and and memory right? So the sort of final point of discussion is like, we also have this evidence that memory. Said, sorry music seems to serve as a really important memory for us.
Classroom B: Hear us all bring back memories. And there's pretty substantial evidence showing that these sort of musically driven or music queued memories are also sort of additionally resistant to
Classroom B: loss or or damage. So if we observe people with memory, people with dementia, Alzheimer's things like that.
Classroom B: They disproportionately retained musical
Classroom B: do different. You know, some different pieces of evidence like this, so music can often help to to retrieve or recover auto biographical memories and run right there. Remember.
Classroom B: we have. We have a lot of evidence that if you say, give a few lines of lyrics from a familiar song people with dimension will sort of spontaneously start humming that tune.
Classroom B: So they they remember something about it.
Classroom B: So yeah, there's something critically important to us about
Classroom B: many of you know, Dr. Boss would say that music is a
Classroom B: kind of was for self-conformation.
Classroom B: I'm gonna I'm gonna stop the recording just for the the sake of discussion.