Facial Expressions of Emotion

Read each of the five articles linked below.  Choose one of the articles to analyze.  Your analysis should include: a brief explanation of what the article says, why you chose this article instead of one of the others and how does this article relate to what we have discussed in class regarding emotion (the different theories, evolution, gender differences, cultural differences)? Include one picture relating to your topic.  Be sure to link the article that you chose to analyze

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Limitations of Memory

Schema theory pertains to a number of interrelates ideas, proposed over the years by several theorists to account for the influence of stored knowledge on current information-processing and behavior. According to the works of theorists, schema performs many interrelated functions such as organizing the information in memory, increasing information-processing efficiency, regulating behavior, enabling the generation of expectations about objects. Schemas are relatively stable and usually very resistant to change thus ensuring continuity in the ways we process information and the ways we act. But schemas can also lead to distortions and mistakes when the settings are unfamiliar and thus require novel approaches, or when the wrong schema becomes activated.  

Barlett's experiment on the effect of schemas on memory, conducted in 1932, shows how schema could distort the memory. In his experiment, Barlett asked his English participants to read The War of the Ghosts, a Native American folk tale. Then Barlett let the participants to reproduce the story that they've read. With successive reproduction, the story became increasingly shorter and distortions were made in the direction of making the story more understandable from within the participant’s experiences and cultural background. For example, activities, which were culturally unfamiliar such as hunting seals, were changed into more familiar ones such as fishing.  

Loftus and Palmer’s experiment on the schemas and eyewitness testimony, conducted in 1974, shows how one particular word can manipulate people’s memory. In the experiment, Loftus and Palmer made participants watch a video of a car crash. Then, they asked the participants about the speed of the cars in the accident. The stronger meaning the word contained, the participants answered with faster speed. For example, when the critical question asked the participants of how fast the car smashed into another car, the average responded rate was 40.8 mph, whereas when the question asked how fast the car contacted to another car, the average rate was 31.8 mph. This shows that people perceive the same speed-ran car in different speed based on the words that describe the event. 

The Ronald Cotton legal case, explored in the post below, also shows how schema can severely distort one’s memory and led an innocent person to spend much part of his life in prison. The wrong schema became activated – Jennifer thought she had to choose the rapist among the pictures that were shown to her, and ended up choosing a wrong guy although he looked quite similar to the real rapist. 


As seen schema can be both helpful – it can help people to think efficiently and behave organized, and harmful - it can manipulate one's memory very easily. But at the same time it can also distort memories in such a way that that person cannot even realize that his/her memory has been distorted. Memory is indeed very vulnerable when not crafted well into one’s mind. But as far as people effectively get advantage of schemas, then it would definitely benefit them.

The Gift of Fear

Emotion is necessary for human survival. Every kinds of emotion, such as fear, joy, sorrow, anger, hunger, greed, satisfaction and etc., contribute to building of our personality and our lives.

In particular, human need fear in order to survive. How can fear help us survive? Simple. If you feel fear, then you run away or get ready to fight. What would happen if you met a tiger in a forest and did not feel fear at all? What if you just stood there and stared at the tiger's eye as if it were a small puppy? Well of course then the tiger would attack you and you'll die. You run away from danger because you feel fear. 


Love, in other way, helped human to survive because it makes human to mate with each other and produce offspring. Greed lets us to discover better ways to live - better food, better clothes, better houses, better technology, and so on. As seen, emotion is a vital part of our lives that make us think and feel the world. If there were no emotion, then we would live like robots and we would not act properly.

Alzheimer's Disease and Memory

Alzheimer's Disease is a serious degenerative brain disease. The main symptoms of the AD relate to memory impairment. Patients experience confusion, depression, hallucinations, delusions, sleeplessness and loss of appetite. AD has no cure and thus inevitably leads to death. Over the age of 65, about 10% gets the disease and over 80, more than half develop the disease. AD affects episodic memory, a memory for events and personal experiences that occurred in a given place at a particular time, most severely. AD also affects semantic memory - a memory that stores general knowledge about the world, concepts and language.

AD develops through a series of stages. First, the MTLs (medial temporal lobe) are affected, in particular the hippocampus, which is very much involved in the formation of new memories. The brain of a patient with AD is found with a low concentrations of acetylcholine in the hippocampus, while the hippocampus of normal people contained higher concentration of acetylcholine. This is because of the severe brain tissue loss in the areas of the forebrain which are known to secrete acetylcholine. 

The brains of AD patients also show abnormal levels of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. Amyloid plaques are caused by deposits in the brain of a sticky protein called amyloid-beta protein. This protein accumulates and damages the membranes of axons and dendrites. Neurofibrillary tangles are caused by accumulation of an abnormal form of the tau protein, which causes the structural support of neurons to collapse.


In the video we watched in the class, the most notable things to be were the families of the patients. The patient is the one who's going through the disease, but the most painful ones are the families. One husband of a patient was all around his wife for all day long, caring for her as if she were a baby. Alzheimer's disease patients often behave aggressively and childishly. They change their mood at any times, and the families have to follow that mood. Some patient didn't even recognize her children. 


I personally feel that the AD is one of the most disastrous disease that a person could get. I don't want to imagine my life around an AD patient - not that they are disgusting or anything, of course. But I never want to watch my parents or my relatives to suffer in the process of losing their memories and at the end become entirely different people. When I find out that I, myself, have the disease, then I would seriously consider committing suicide, because I don't want to throw my families' lives into despair like the ones in the video that I've seen.

Emotion, Gender and Culture

Emotion and Gender

Relationship between emotion gender is most part in its discovery yet. Psychologists are revising the question statement to "Who is more emotional within context X?" from "Who is more emotional?".


Thus there's no much example for this topic, but one interesting story here. In 1996 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a case concerning the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), where only men were admitted to enter. In the court case where women were asking for admittance, men refused becuase "Compared with men, women are more emotional, less aggressive, suffer more from fear of failure, and cannot withstand stress as well" (Greenberger&Blake, 1996).


Emotion and Culture

One of the examples regarding emotion and culture is that in some cultures, people attending funeral has to show extreme grief to show the magnitude of their love to the person deceased. But in some cultures, people should feign stoic and show no extreme grief, since it may worsen the gloomy atmosphere.

Another example is the difference between emotion in chronic war-time region and peaceful region. People who are living in a place where the war has continued for decades or centuries might not feel frighten of sounds of gunshot or bombarding, because they are all accustomed to the sounds. In contrast, people living in peaceful area will be terrified when they hear a single gunshot.

A Man With Lost Identity

Henry Gustav Molaison (H.M.) was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science by participating in hundreds of brain studies after the radical change happened to his life after the surgery in his brain.

H.M. has suffered from seizures and convulsions since he was 9 years old, after being hit by a bicycle rider. 18 years after the bicycle accident, H.M. and his doctor decided to remove two finger-shaped slivers called "hippocampus". H.M's seizures abated, but his memories went through abrupt changes. Some part of H.M.'s memory stayed intact, but he failed in converting short term memory to long term memory. For example, H.M. could talk and have a good time with a doctor, just that the next day he would never remember the doctor and what they did the day before. 

At the time, scientists didn't believe that memory was dependent on any one neural organ or region. But later scientists saw that there were at least two systems in brain for creating new memories. One, known as declarative memory, records names, faces and new experiences and stores them until they are consciously retrieved. This system depends on the function of medial temporal areas, particularly an organ called the hippocampus. Apparently H.M. got damaged in the hippocampus, and that was why he couldn't convert short term memory to long term memory.

False Memory - Is Eyewitness Testimony Reliable?

The story of Ronald Cotton astonishes everyone. On August 1, 1984, Ronald Cotton was arrested for rape and burglary. Jennifer Thompson, the victim of the crime, studied the assailant’s face carefully so that she could bring him to the court. But later when she had come to choose an assailant’s photo, she chose a wrong guy – Cotton – and kept asserting he’s the one who raped her while Cotton kept denying the crime. On top of the suspicious behaviors of Cotton (giving false alibi) was the eyewitness’s testimony, which played a definitive role in sentencing Cotton to life plus 54 years in prison. Couple of years later, Cotton hears another inmate’s bragger about how he raped Jennifer and asks for a second trial. But once again in the court where the real rapist, Bobby Poole was seated, Jennifer appointed Cotton as the rapist and didn’t doubt the fact. Cotton was sent back to prison with heavier sentence. Cotton was exonerated in 1995, after DNA testing vindicated Cotton to be innocent.

Why did Jennifer point at Cotton again in the second trial, when she was actually facing the real rapist? Why didn’t she doubt her choice? Why was she so sure about it?

Everything comes down to her memory. When Jennifer was to choose the criminal’s photo, with many photos given, she assumed one of the photos was the photo of a real rapist. And even when there was no correct photo in the deck, she picked one up (actually the one who looked very similar to the real rapist) and started to believe that the person in the photo was a rapist. That belief caused her memory to change and to adopt into that fact. This process made her wrong eyewitness memory so firm that later when she saw the real rapist in the court, she still couldn't realize that. 

Is eyewitness testimony reliable? The answer is no, and for sure. There always exist a danger that eyewitness's memory could be manipulated. And this slight change in the memory, which then is used in court for an evidence, could doom innocent people's lives. Even if the eyewitness might not do it in purpose, there can exist an error since the testimony is completely relying on memory, and because memory too is not stable and lasting forever intact.