Emotion

Module 4.8a

LEARING TARGETS:

• Identify some of the basic emotions.
• Explain the link between emotional arousal & the autonomic nervous system.
• Explain how emotions activate different physiological & brain-pattern responses.

Basic Emotions

• Fear, anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, (surprise)
• Basic emotions are innate (inborn) and “hard-wired”
• Complex emotions are a blend of many aspects of emotions
• Classified along two dimensions
1. Pleasant (Positive Valence) or unpleasant (Negative Valence)
2. Level of activation or arousal associated with the emotion

Concept of Emotion

• Simply stated: Categories of feelings caused by things in the environment that are important to us
• stimuli that produce high arousal generally produce strong feelings
• are rapid and automatic
• emerged through natural selection to benefit survival and reproduction – evolutionary perspective
• There are a limited number of basic emotions that all humans, in every culture, experience.
• People often experience a blend of emotions or mixed emotions, rather than a pure emotion.

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The Neuroscience of Emotion

The Nervous System & Emotion

Divisions of the Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

• The division of the peripheral nervous system that controls the glands and muscles of the internal organs
• Monitors the autonomic functions
• Controls breathing, blood pressure, and digestive processes
• Divided into the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems
• Cross-cultural studies have demonstrated that the basic emotions are associated with distinct patterns of autonomic nervous system activity

Divisions of the Nervous System

Sympathetic Nervous System

• The part of the autonomic nervous system that arouses the body to deal with perceived threats
• Fight or flight response

Divisions of the Nervous System

Parasympathetic Nervous System

• The part of the autonomic nervous system that calms the body
• Brings the body back down to a relaxed state

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Physical Arousal and Emotions

• Sympathetic nervous system is aroused with emotions (fight-or-flight response)
• Different emotions stimulate different responses
• Fear—decrease in skin temperature (cold-feet)
• Anger—increase in skin temperature (hot under the collar)
• A recent study using PET scans found that each of four emotions (sadness, happiness, anger, and fear) produced a distinct pattern of brain activation and deactivation
• This indicates that each emotion involves distinct neural circuits in the brain

Brain-Based Theory of Emotions

• Insula
• Becomes active with negative social emotions (lusting after someone’s partner, pridefulness, disgust)
• Amygdala
• evaluate the significance of stimuli and generate emotional responses
• generate hormonal secretions and autonomic reactions that accompany strong emotions
• damage causes “psychic blindness” and the inability to recognize fear in facial expressions and voice

Brain-Based Theory of Emotions

• Frontal lobes
• influence people’s conscious emotional feelings and ability to act in planned ways based on feelings (e.g., effects of prefrontal lobotomy)

left frontal lobe

may be most

involved in

processing

positive emotions

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right frontal lobe

involved with

negative emotions

Fear: A Closer Look�The Role of Brain in Emotion

How You Experience Fear

• When a person is faced with a potentially threatening stimulus, the visual stimulus is first routed to the thalamus.
• Information is then relayed simultaneously along two neural pathways:
1. Low Road: crude, archetypal information travels rapidly to the amygdala (in the limbic system),
2. High Road: More detailed information travels to the visual cortex, where the stimulus is interpreted

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• If the cortex determines that a threat exists, the information is relayed to the amygdala along the longer, slower pathway.

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Amygdala then sends information along two pathways

1. One pathway leads to an area of the hypothalamus, then on to the medulla; together, they trigger arousal of the sympathetic nervous system
2. Another pathway leads to a different hypothalamus area that, in concert with the pituitary gland, triggers the release of stress hormones.
1. Joseph LeDoux believes that the direct thalamus–amygdala connection represents an adaptive response that has been hard-wired by evolution in the human brain.
2. The indirect route allows more complex stimuli to be evaluated in the cortex.

Fear Pathway in the Brain

When you’re faced with a potentially threatening stimulus—like a snake dangling from a stick—information arrives in the thalamus (blue) and is relayed simultaneously along two pathways. Crude, archetypal information rapidly travels the direct route to the amygdala (red), triggering an almost instantaneous fear response. More detailed information is sent along the pathway to the visual cortex (blue), where the stimulus is interpreted. If the cortex determines that a threat exists, the information is relayed to the amygdala along the longer, slower pathway. The amygdala triggers other brain structures, such as the hypothalamus, which activate the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine system’s release of stress hormones.

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I Have Had it with these ?#@*&%! SNAKES!

Applications of Neuroscience & Emotion

Lie Detection

• The polygraph doesn’t really detect lies.
• Some of its many problems include:
• false negative results,
• false positive results,
• highly subjective interpretations of the physical changes that occur
• A variety of nonverbal cues, especially microexpressions, are associated with deception, but no single nonverbal cue indicates that someone is lying

Are Lie Detectors Accurate?

Benjamin Kleinmuntz and Julian Szucko (1984) had polygraph experts study the polygraph data of 50 theft suspects who later confessed to being guilty and 50 suspects whose innocence was later established by someone's confession. Had the polygraph experts been the judges, more than one-third of the innocent would have been declared guilty, and almost one-fourth of the guilty would have been declared innocent.

Which is the lie and which is the truth?

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Reading Nonverbal Communication

Click Here to Play in a separate window

The first part (about her past) is the lie.

• Facial muscles, in particular, are hard to control and can reveal emotions that a person is trying to conceal
• Trained lie-catchers can detect minute changes in facial expressions (called microexpressions) that reveal lying.

View beginning of Lie to Me TV Show where they talk about Microexpressions (4 min)