Emotion



Emotion

Emotion

1. Physiological Activation

2. Expressive Behaviors

3. Conscious Experience

Think about the strongest emotion that you have ever felt…

Can you describe the following…

1. Physiological Activation

2. Expressive Behaviors

3. Conscious Experience

The “Near Death” experience

Your heart races, your hands and legs shake… and then you feel emotions.

Fear followed your body’s response.

The James-Lange Theory- our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli.

“We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.”

Support for the theory-

Facial expressions of emotion tend to intensify the experience of emotion

Neck level spinal cord injuries reduce the intensity with which people experience certain emotions

Cannon-Bard Theory

Physiological arousal and emotional arousal experience occur simultaneously.

The emotion-triggering stimulus is routed simultaneously

1. to the brain’s cortex, causing the subjective awareness of emotion and

2. to the sympathetic nervous system causing the body’s arousal.

Your heart begins pounding as you experience fear; one does not cause the other.

ex. Your babysitting at a house located in the middle of nowhere, its almost midnight and you hear the window rattle, then you immediately feel a rush of fear.

Some believe that our cognitions (perceptions, memories, interpretations) are essential to our emotions.

Schachter’s Two Factor Theory

Emotions have two ingredients:

1. physical arousal (heart pounding)

2. cognitive label (“I am afraid”)

Schachter presumed that our experience of emotion grows from our awareness of our body’s arousal

ex. If you have a fear of spiders and one is on your lap your heart begins to beat faster and you are aware that you are afraid.

Spill over effect- when our arousal response to one event spills over into our response to another event

ex. Your brother calls you in the middle of the Steeler game to tell you he’s getting married. You were nervous when he called so you don’t feel as confident as you would have under normal circumstances

Quizzo 1

Mary’s mother said, “You know you are in love when your heart beats fast and you experience that unique trembling feeling inside.”

A. James-Lange

B. Cannon-Bard

C. Two Factor theory

Quizzo 2

According to the Cannon-Bard Theory, body arousal is to the sympathetic nervous system as subjective awareness of emotion is to the

Cortex

Hypothalamus

Thalamus

Parasympathetic Nervous system

Quizzo #3

You would still be able to experience emotion in the absence of any sympathetic nervous system arousal according to the

a. Cannon-Bard

b. James-Lange

Quizzo #4

A car nearly side-swipes you as you drive down the road. Your friend jokes that you almost had a two-colored car and you laugh uncontrollably. Your emotional volatility can be explained by?

a. James-Lange

b. Cannon-Bard

c. Two-factor theory

Must Cognition precede Emotion?

Robert Zajonc (ZI-yence)-- emotional reactions can be quicker than our interpretation of a situation; we feel some emotion before we think.

Emotions require no conscious thinking

For example, have you ever liked something or someone immediately, without knowing why?

Richard Lazarus– our brains are working & thinking without us being conscious of it.

Some emotional responses-especially simple likes, dislikes, and fears-involve no conscious thinking. We may fear a spider, even if we “know” it is harmless.

Our emotions are greatly affected by our interpretations, memories, and expectations.

Two Dimensions of Emotion

Valence– or positive vs. negative emotions (i.e. happiness versus sadness)

Arousal– or low versus high arousal (i.e. afraid versus terrified)

Emotion and Physiology

Emotions involve the body’s physical responses.

Ex: hear someone following you– your muscles get tense, butterflies in stomach, and your mouth gets dry because of fear.

Without conscious effort your body body's adaptive response is to fight or flight.

“Fear lends wings to his feet.”

Physiological Arousal

Autonomic Nervous System

Sympathetic: arousing

Parasympathetic: calming

Arousal and Performance

1. Prolonged physical arousal taxes the body

2. Arousal is adaptive

3. Too little arousal is as bad as too much

We perform best while moderately aroused but levels vary with different tasks.

Easy/well learned tasks (runners running), peak performance comes with high arousal (competition).

Difficult/unrehearsed tasks, like taking a test, the optimal arousal is lower.

Teaching anxious students how to relax before an exam often enables them to perform better

Physiology of Specific Emotions- Each separate emotion feels different

Anger – hot inner tension

Fear – sinking sensation in chest and knot in stomach

Happiness – warm, euphoria

All emotions increase heart rate

Responses to emotions are universal and innate, expressed similarly throughout the world

Effects of Emotions

Different emotions stimulate different facial muscles ex. Smile, eyes widen, brows tighten

Fearful faces show amygdala (limbic system) brain activity

People with negative personalities show more brain activity in the right prefrontal lobe

After having lost a portion of the right prefrontal lobe, a patient was less irritable and more affectionate

Positive people show more activity in the left frontal lobe than in the right

The left frontal lobe’s rich supply of dopamine receptors may help explain the disposition.

Polygraph testing

Polygraph-- lie detector-- measures physiological responses accompanied by emotion such as perspiration, cardio vascular, and breathing changes.

Reasons why it doesn’t work!

Can’t distinguish between anxiety, irritation, and guilt

Labeled as the “fear detection” test

1988 US Congress prohibited lie detector testing but in 1998 the military prohibited polygraph testing

Advice: Never take the test if you are innocent, some questions may upset you causing physiological changes in your body– making you appear to be lying.

Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal communication is just as strong as regular communication

The closer you know someone, the easier it is to detect the nonverbal cues

It is very easy to misread e-mails– it’s hard to understand if the statement is serious, kidding, or sarcastic

Women surpass men at reading emotional cues.

Women’s have an advantage at spotting lies & discerning whether a male/female couple are a genuinely romantic couple or a posed phony couple

Women are also far more likely to describe themselves as empathetic

Culture and Emotional Expression

Meaning of gestures varies with culture

Ex: Chinese clap their hands to express worry or disappoint

But, people from different cultures interpret expressions similarly

More on Emotional Expression

Children’s facial expressions (including those who are blind from birth) are also universal

Darwin speculated that in pre-language times humans ability to communicate with facial expressions aided survival

Can you figure out what these expressions mean?

Does emotion differ between cultures?

Cultures differ in how much emotion they express.

Ex: In western Europe and North America emotional displays are often tense and prolonged

People in Asian countries rarely display emotion when in the presence of others

The Effects of Facial Expressions

Expressions amplify emotion

Making a happy face will make you feel slightly happier

Saying “E” and “ah” Which activate smiling muscles put you in a better mood

This phenomenon is called facial feedback

Fear

Fear can preoccupy our thinking

Fear is adaptive

Can help us focus on a problem and rehearse coping strategies

(ex. Fear of injury can protect us from harm, fear of punishment can keep us from hurting one another)

People can learn to fear almost anything

We can also learn fear from our parents and friends

Biology of Fear

People are biologically prepared to learn fears– like the one that helped our ancestors to survive (fear of cliffs)

Stone age fears leave us unprepared for new age fears like cars or bombs

Damage to the amygdala will result in no emotion to events

Damage to the hippocampus will result in an emotional reaction but no memory why

Fear also comes from genetics for example, identical twins reared separately still exhibit the same level of fearfulness

Anger

What makes people angry?

In a study done by James Averill people recalled being most angry when friends or loved ones’ perceive willful or unjustifiable misdeeds.

What should we do with our anger?

Should we vent or hold our frustrations in?

There is no right or wrong answer

In Japan people are taught to be considerate and gentle. And from childhood on expression on anger is less common than in western cultures.

Catharsis– an emotional release.

The theory is that anger is reduced by aggressive action or fantasy

Expressing anger doesn’t always help reduce aggressive tension. It can encourage more anger.

Blowing off anger can temporarily reduce anger and calm us down but overall– in the long run expressing anger amplifies hostility.

So what is the best way of expressing anger then?

1. First…wait. You can lower the level of arousal of anger by waiting.

2. Second… don’t’ keep all of your anger in and don’t release all of your anger at every little annoyance. Just take a moment to calm yourself down and relax.

Happiness

Your mood correlates to how you view the world. Happier people tend to have a more optimistic view.

Feel-good, do-good phenomenon-- we are happy, we are more willing to help others.

We sometimes overestimate the long-term emotional effects of bad news and our ability to adapt.

People who have more interest in love rather than money are generally more satisfied with life.

College students that were “really happy” were distinguished not by money but by their close relationships.

The Principles of Happiness

The Adaptation-Level Principle: Happiness is Relative to Our Prior Experience

Adaptation-level phenomenon – our tendency to form judgments relative to a “neutral” level defined by our prior experience

We adjust “neutral” levels according to our experience with the subject

Even if we feel happy when we get a raise in income, eventually we will become used to it and require more to be happy with it.

Satisfaction and dissatisfaction, are relative to our recent experience.

The Relative Deprivation Principle: Happiness Is Relative to Others’ Attainment

Relative deprivation – the perception that one is worse off relative to those with whom one compares oneself

If we see many others in our office getting promoted, we will have higher expectations for our own success, often resulting in disappointment

Just as this is true, if we observe people well below our own income level, we will feel better about our own success.

“I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”

Predicting happiness

Since our emotions tend to balance out over time, why are some people happy day after day and others gloomy?

50% of the difference among people’s happiness rating is genetic.

Depending on our outlooks and experiences, our happiness generally stays around a “happiness set point”

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download