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

Click here to read the article

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.