Course Syllabus for CCST9073 Emotion, Cognition, and Brain

Course description

We are all emotional. But have you ever wondered what exactly emotion is? Why we have emotions? Do animals
have emotion? Can robots have emotion? To what extent can we control our emotion or is emotion actually controlling
us? What are the relationships among emotion, cognition, and brain? Why bother to ask these questions? – It is
important to explore the genesis of human emotion as it strongly affects human behavior, especially the extreme ones.
To move more deeply into the above questions, we need to visit different fields of knowledge in, for instance,
philosophy, psychology, and biology. The general aim of this course is to provide new understanding and inspire new
thinking about our emotional-self through linking the subjective feelings to objective scientific studies of the human
brain and cognition—and to ask about the meaning of “objective” and “subjective”, thereby approaching our
fundamental humanity through the channels of emotion.

Instructor: Dr. Guang Ouyang (ouyangg@hku.hk)

Tutor: Ms Nicole, Shuang Wang (nicolews@hku.hk)

Required reading

Adolphs, R., & Anderson, D. J. (2018). The neuroscience of emotion: A new synthesis. Princeton University Press.
[Chaps. 1-5]

Required viewing

Docter, P. (Director). (2015). Inside Out.

Suggested reading

Eysenck, M. W., & Keane, M. T. (2015). Cognitive psychology: A student’s handbook (7th ed.). London: Taylor &
Francis Group.

Introduction to Psychology - The Full NOBA Collection.

Weekly topics in the lecture

Topic 1: The relationship between emotion, cognition and brain: Emotion

The basic concepts, theories, scientific studies related to emotion, and its relationship with cognition and
brain.

Topic 2: The relationship between emotion, cognition and brain: Cognition

The basic concepts, theories, scientific studies related to cognition, and its relationship with emotion and
brain.

Topic 3: The relationship between emotion, cognition and brain: Brain

How brain supports emotion and cognition, how to measure the brain activities associated with emotion and
cognition.
Topic 4: In-class demonstration of collecting brain EEG data

Showcase the basic set-up of a brain signal recording experiment. Introduce how to use the EEG technology
to study emotion and cognition.

Topic 5: Research principles on how to conduct a research on emotion and cognition in Neuroscience

Introduce the basic principles and general procedure of conducting a scientific investigation on emotion and
cognition.

Topic 6: Emotion and arts

How many different forms of art can be used to express emotions? How are emotions manifested in those
arts? Are there specific forms of art (e.g., specific genre of music, instrument) that are better in expressing
emotion than other forms? How are different types of emotions expressed by those arts? And what are the
possible scientific mechanisms? How to conduct a neuroscientific research on this topic?

Topic 7: Emotion in gaming activities

How games manipulate emotions and engage players, and what brain science can show us the emotional
activity of brain during game playing.

Topic 8: Emotion in animals

Do animals have emotion? How to study animal emotion? How does the research on animal emotion inspire
or contribute to research on human emotion? What are the similarities and essential differences between
human’s and animal’s emotions?

Topic 9: Artificial intelligence and emotion

Robots are becoming smarter and smarter. But can they have emotion? Or display emotion that can fool
human? This session will introduce the development of artificial intelligence and how it is linked to human
emotion and cognition.

Course assessment

Assessment Tasks Weighting

Project 55

Intermittent assignments 45

Lecture schedule and venue:

Time: Saturday 10:30-12:20 AM Hong Kong SAR

Scheduled dates for lecture:

First 3 weeks: lecture on Zoom - Sep 5, 12, 19

Afterwards: Face-to-face lecture; Saturday 10:30-12:20 AM @ MWT1

Join Zoom Meeting for the lecture:

https://hku.zoom.us/j/93874299195

Meeting ID: 938 7429 9195

Online Tutorial schedule:

Thursday 10:30-11:20 & 11:30-12:20 & 14:30-15:20 & 15:30-16:20

Dates: Sep 10, 17, 24; Oct 8, 22, 29; Nov 5, 12, 19, 26

Friday 10:30-11:20 & 11:30-12:20 & 14:30-15:20 & 15:30-16:20

Dates: Sep 11, 18, 25, Oct 9, 23, 30; Nov 6, 13, 20, 27

(There are 10 tutorial classes each week, please select one timeslot to attend.)

Join Zoom Meeting for the tutorial:

https://hku.zoom.us/j/96747996112

Meeting ID: 967 4799 6112

Class schedule and deadlines for 2020-21 Semester 1

Date Lecture Content Assessment Deadlines

Week 1 5-Sep General Introduction (Online)
Week 2 12-Sep Emotion (Online)
Week 3 19-Sep Cognition (Online)
Week 4 26-Sep Brain
Week 5 3-Oct EEG Demonstration
Week 6 10-Oct Research Principles Submission of Assignment 1
Week 7 No Class - Reading Week
Week 8 24-Oct Emotion and Arts Submission of Assignment 2
Week 9 No Class - HKU Information Day
Week 10 7-Nov Emotion in Gaming Submission of Project artwork
Week 11 14-Nov Emotion in Animals Submission of Assignment 3
Week 12 21-Nov AI and Emotion
Week 13 28-Nov Wrap-up
Week 14 Revision Week
Week 15 12-Dec Assessment period Submission of Project writing
Intermittent assignments for CCST9073 Emotion, Cognition and Brain

Weight: 45 pts (Course total 100 pts)

Intermittent assignment 1.

Deadline: Week 6 - Oct 10

1a: Propose two non-empirical questions, and turn them into thematically related empirical questions.

Examples:

Original non-empirical questions Converted questions

What is the most important emotion in life? Which emotion is the most widely studied one in science?

Which basketball team received the most discussion on social

Which basketball team is the best?
media in 2020?
Which country is best rated in tourism destination attractiveness
Which country is the most beautiful?
across major platforms?
Which major is the most awesome one at
Which major at HKU receives the most applications in 2020?
HKU?
What percentage of people believe that meditation can improve
What is the best way to regulate emotion?
their emotional regulation ability?

1b: According to lecture 5, propose two poorly-formulated research questions, and turn them into thematically
related well-formulated research questions.

Examples:

Original poorly-formulated research questions Converted research questions

Do leaders tend to be mean? (too vague) Do large company CEOs have less compassion?

Is there an association between time-with-parents during

How does parenting shape personality? (too broad)
childhood and an individual’s autistic trait?

What are the major structures in the brain that generate

Why do emotions exist? (too philosophical)
emotion?

Intermittent assignment 2.

Deadline: Week 8 – Oct 24

Dissect a given journal paper, and identify the following components:

1) Research Question 2) Brain-imaging technology used 3) Key variables 4) Major results and conclusions

Totally words < 300.

Intermittent assignment 3.

Deadline: Week 11 - Nov 14

Submit a brief research topic proposal with a bibliography.

1). Identify a cognitive ability (can be related or not related to emotion), conceptually explain it, and propose a
method to measure it (total words < 200).

2) Find three relevant research articles (usually termed ‘paper’) that are related to the cognitive ability you identified
and used brain-imaging technologies.

Requirements: The impact factor of the journal must be higher than two. The impact factor of a journal can be
searched by google. If the paper is published more than five years ago, the citation needs to be higher than 20. The
citation of a paper can be found in Google Scholar. An example of such a paper is shown in the link below:

https://scholar.google.com.hk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Implicit+emotion+regulation+in+the+context+of+
viewing+artworks%3A+ERP+evidence+in+response+to+pleasant+and+unpleasant+pictures&btnG=

Project Assignment for CCST9073 Emotion, Cognition and Brain

Weight: 55 pts (Course total 100 pts)

Grouping: The project can be conducted collaboratively or individually. If students form a group (collaboratively),
each group member will gain an additional 2 pts. No matter in a group or by individual, the report & proposal has to
be done individually.

Components of assignment:

C1. Artwork creation. Create an artwork related to emotion. Deadline: Week 10 - Nov 7.

C2. Report & proposal. Write a report about the artwork creation and identify a research question from it (or
related to it) and propose a research plan. Deadline: Week 15 – Dec 12.

Detailed notes:

For C1

1. Do not use restricted content (e.g., extremely violent/disgusting/sexual materials)

2. If grouping, the size of a group cannot be more than 10.
3. There is no restriction on the form of the artwork. It can be a paint, calligraphy, a (collection of)
photograph, a short video, a piece of melody, behavioral art (recorded), a computer graphic, a design of
anything, a collection of certain articles. But the artwork has to be presentable and can be documented
as it has to be submitted to Moodle.
4. This assignment is NOT to test some sort of skill/talent/sense/aptitude in art creation. The artistic quality
(if that exists) will not be considered in the grading process.
 For C2

1. Write up a report (>1000 words) to describe your work:

Please present your artwork in the report or attach a link to it.

Describe the ideas of the design, how the idea was initiated, the motivation, the process of
achieving the idea.

Describe what the major emotion/context/topic the work aims to target at, the major novel
or creative elements in this work.

Elaborate why this work is efficient in expressing/delivering the emotion, what could be
the cognitive/neural mechanisms that may underlie this design.

2. Identify a research question from this artwork. The research question can be directly from any elements
of this artwork or conceptually related to it. The research question should be related to emotion or
cognition.
3. Write up a proposal (>2000 words, excluding reference) to study this research question:

Formulate the research question and identify the variables to be studied and how to
measure the variables.

Describe the research plan and method to be used or developed to study this research
question.

Elaborate the potential impact of the research on human society in the future.

4. Cited references should be less than 10.

5. A research proposal is NOT about the actual carrying-out of research. For a research proposal, you just
need to layout the ideas and plans (see above). No need to conduct the research (e.g., collecting the data
and analyzing the data).

Explanatory examples:

1. What is a valid research question?

1.1. A valid research question should be empirical. An empirical question can be answered objectively by
collecting and observing the data. A non-empirical question is usually a subjective question, and cannot be
answered by objective data.

Examples of empirical question:

- Does lack of sleep make people more bad-tempered?

- Does physical exercise improve short-term memory?
- Does drawing increase attention span in children with ADHD?
- Does early separation from litter increase behavioral problems in pups?
- How do cultural differences affect people’s facial expression behavior?
- What effect does the daily use of Instagram have on the attention span of teenagers?
Examples of non-empirical question:

- Which basketball team is the best?

- Which country is the most beautiful?
- Which major is the most awesome one at HKU?
- What is the most important emotion in life?
- What is the best way to regulate emotion?

1.2. A valid research question should be feasible to conduct research to answer.

(The examples of the empirical question above are all feasible)

Examples of research question that is not feasible to study:

- Why do emotions exist?

- Will we lose emotion if our right brain is gone?
- Will people be more successful if they have a near-death experience?
- What the world would be like if robots have emotions?
- Can people make better decisions if they are deprived of emotions?

2. How to identify a research question related to emotion or cognition from an artwork?

Every artwork contains a certain element that effectively influences a person’s perception, cognition, emotion,
feeling, or mood. Sometimes the elements are easy to identify, sometimes not. There should be a reason or
several reasons why the elements affect our emotion or cognition, which forms a research question. Below
are some examples:

Example 1:

This is simply a photograph of a dog. But it may induce emotion of fear or depression. The key element that
induces negative emotions could be the darkness ambient. The reason could be darkness environment restricts
our knowledge about the environment, creates more uncertainty and a sense of risk. Therefore, humans tend
to avoid darkness—an instinct that is manifested as the emotion of fear. As a comparison, a picture of a dog
(see below) without darkness ambient does not induce fear or depression.
A research question related to this can be: Will darkness in a scene image induce fear (or depression, or
unpleasantness)? To conduct research to answer this research question, you can present participants with
scene pictures with or without darkness ambient, and ask the participant to rate the picture in certain
dimensions. You can further design a brain imaging study to use EEG, fMRI, fNIRS, or PET to study the
effect of darkness ambient on the brain. Note: you cannot use pictures with extremely horrifying elements as
it may not be approved by the ethics committee. A research project has to be approved by the ethics committee
anyway.

Do not directly use this example of dark ambient in your project/proposal (unless you have other components
in your research proposal that is highly innovative).

Similarly, you can identify many other elements in other forms of artwork (paint, music, film), and propose
a research question from them. It has to be noted that when you are designing your project, do not be restricted
by the word ‘artwork’. In addition to the above-mentioned note that the ‘artistic-ness’ of the artwork will not
be involved as a criterion in grading, please be reminded that you can define the artwork by yourself. That
said, you can present a work that is related to a theme from which you want to find a research question. The
theme can be, e.g., 1) intensity of emotion; 2) cultural differences and emotion expression; 3) complex
emotion and its context; 4) gaming and addiction. You can also look for some inspiration from daily life, e.g.,
you really love your puppy and you adopted it when it was little, you may create a work addressing your
relationship with your puppy, and then a thematically related research question can be: how early separation
from litter affect the emotional wellbeing of a puppy? Or, you really like playing video games. You may
create a work addressing your emotional experience in gaming. A thematically related research question can
be to explore the impact of reward in video games on the gaming experience. Or, if you are into background
music in film, you may use GarageBand to create one, then a related RQ might be: how background music
in a film affects one’s rating of the film.

3. What is a variable?
A research study is usually to explore how a variable affects (or is correlated with) another variable. Before
conducting the research, we need clearly conceptualize and operationalize the variable. Conceptualization
refers to the definition of the variable, namely, providing a conceptual description of the variable.
Operationalization refers to proposing a method to measure (quantify) the variable.
In the previous example of the research question: “Will darkness in a scene image induce fear?”, The two
key variables are 1) darkness ambient and 2) feeling of fear. The concepts (meaning) of both variables are
quite obvious, but how to operationalize them? In other words, how to turn them into something that is
quantitatively measurable, in order to study their relationship? In the example described above, we have
 proposed to quantify “darkness ambient” into two levels (dark and bright, to put it in a quantitative way, 1
and 0). We have quantified the scene pictures with darkness ambient with 1, and scene pictures with bright
ambient with 0. For the variable “feeling of fear”, we quantify (operationalize) it by a continuous scale using
self-rate. The participants are asked to rate the scariness of the scene picture based on a number scale of 0-
10 (for example). Therefore, we have operationalized both variables to study their relationships.
In addition, regarding the “feeling of fear”, we can have a new way of quantification (operationalization)
based on neural activities. It can be assumed that feeling of fear will induce stronger activation in certain
regions in the brain (e.g., amygdala). By measuring the activation strength in the relevant areas, we can use
it as an objective measurement for “feeling of fear”, and then we can further study its relationship with the
variable of “darkness ambient”.
To sum up, for a research proposal, you need to clearly identify the variable to study (conceptualization), and
how it will be measured (operationalization), and what kind of relationship between them you hypothesized.

3. What are the differences between technology and method?

To carry out a research study, you may need different methods or use different technology to achieve your
research outcome. Method refers to the systematic procedures by which you will conduct your research.
Technology refers to specific tools (usually new ones) you will use. A method can use different technologies
and technology can be used in different methods. Below are some examples of methods and technology.

Method Survey, interview, experiment design, comparison, taxonomy, statistical analysis, etc.

Brainimaging (EEG, fMRI, fNIRS, etc), devices for measuring physiological signals,
Technology Actigraphy devices, eye-tracking devices, motion capture technology, AI algorithms
for pattern extraction, etc.

Grading rubric for CCST9073 Emotion, Cognition and Brain

General guideline: The assessment of the coursework will weigh relatively more on the completeness, formality,
clarity, and coherence of all the required work and components, and weigh relatively less on scientific rigor, theoretical
depth, methodological and technical sophistication. That being said, if students are not entirely clear about the
appropriateness of applying some cognitive and neuroscientific theory or technology, it is not suggested to dive deep
into the neuroscientific knowledge and theories. It is rather suggested to elaborate on the basic rationales, ideas, and
thoughts.

Intermittent assignment 1 (10 pts)

Accordance with the assignment description. 1-10pts

Intermittent assignment 2 (15 pts)

Accordance with the assignment description. Clarity of writing. 1-15pts

Intermittent assignment 3 (20 pts)

 Accordance with the assignment description. Clarity of writing. 1-20pts

Group project summary (55 pts)

Describe the ideas of the design, how the idea was initiated, the motivation, the process
of achieving the idea, what the major emotion/context/topic the work aims to target at, 1-10pts
the major novel or creative elements in this work.

Elaborate why this work is efficient in expressing/delivering the emotion, what could be
1-10pts
the cognitive/neural mechanisms that may underlie this special design.

Formulation of research question. 1-10pts

Describe the research plan and method/technology to be used. 1-10pts
Creativity, innovation, originality. 1-5pts
Elaborate the potential impact of the research. 1-5pts
Basic writing performance, clarity. 1-5pts