Emotion

Emotion

Emotion

• a complex psychological process that is distinct from reasoning or knowledge
• reflects internal and external factors
• a response of the whole organism
• physiological arousal
• expressive behaviors
• conscious experience

Theories of Emotion

Does your heart pound because you are afraid… or are you afraid because you feel your heart pounding?

James-Lange Theory of Emotion

• Experience of emotion is awareness of physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli
• Physiological arousal => Emotion

Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotion

Emotion-arousing stimuli simultaneously trigger:

• physiological responses
• subjective experience of emotion
• physiological response and emotion happen simultaneously

Singer-Schachter’s Two-Factor Theory of Emotion

• To experience emotion one must:
• be physically aroused
• cognitively label the arousal
• we need to be cognitively aware of the emotion we feel

Emotion

Cognitive Label/Appraisal

• one’s appraisal/understanding of how they feel based on the situation and context
• for example, determining whether one feels happy or angry at a party when experiencing physiological arousal
• the cognitive label/appraisal is a person’s self-awareness/understanding of how they feel

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Emotion

Article about the Two-Factor Theory:

https://www.verywellmind.com/the-two-factor-theory-of-emotion-2795718

Emotion and Physiology

Flaws of the James-Lange Theory

• Physiological similarities among specific emotions include perspiration, breathing, and heart rates.
• Sometimes there are physiological and brain pattern differences among specific emotions.
• Fear and joy both increase heart rate, but they stimulate different facial muscles.
• Watching fearful faces shows more amygdala activity than watching angry faces

Emotion and Physiology

Broaden-and-build Theory

• proposes that positive emotional experiences tend to broaden awareness and encourage new actions and thoughts
• whereas negative emotions tend to reduce awareness and make thinking and action more narrow

Emotion and Physiology

• Experiencing negative emotions such as disgust shows more activity in the right prefrontal cortex than in the left.
• Depressed-prone people also show more right frontal activity.
• Right frontal lobe is associated with negative emotions.

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Emotion and Physiology

• Left frontal lobe is associated with happy and positive emotions.
• Left frontal lobe has a rich supply of dopamine receptors (dopamine is associated with reward-motivated behaviors).
• The nucleus accumbens is a cluster of neurons that light up with people experience natural or drug-induced pleasures.
• Electrical stimulation of this region caused patients to smile, laugh, and feel giddy with euphoria.

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Cognition and Emotion

• How we think is connected to how we feel (two-factor theory)
• Schachter and Singer's experiment:
• When told that increased heart rate, rapid breathing, and body flushes were due to an injection of noepinephrine, participants felt little emotion because they attributed their arousal to the drug.
• Participants who were not told that the arousal was due to the drug attributed the arousal to experiencing the emotion they “caught” from observing the angry, euphoric, or irritated actor (spillover effect).

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Cognition and Emotion

• Arousal fuels emotion; cognition channels it
• People who are already aroused are likely to experience stronger emotions.
• A person is likely to feel more angry if he or she was previously provoked.
• Arousal from one emotion (frustration) could spillover to another emotion (passion)

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Cognition and Emotion

Other Theories of Emotion

• Cognition does not always precede emotion
• Emotions can be experienced without a conscious awareness of the emotion
• Emotions can take a “high-road” (via neural pathways that bypass the cortex) or a “low-road” pathway from the eye or ear via the thalamus to amygdala (the emotional control center)

Cognition and Emotion

The brain’s shortcut for emotions

Two Routes to Emotion

Expressed Emotion

People more speedily detect an angry face than a happy one (Ohman, 2001a)

Expressed Emotion

The ingredients of emotion

Expressed Emotion

• Emotions can be conveyed through gazing and making facial expressions
• Some people are more sensitive to others when it comes to reading emotions
• Women tend to be better at reading nonverbal cues
• Women are more likely to describe themselves as empathetic

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Expressed Emotion

“Women have surpassed men in discerning whether a male-female couple is a genuine romantic couple or a posed phony couple, and in discerning which of two people in a photo is the other's supervisor” (Barnes & Sternberg, 1989)

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Expressed Emotion

Gender and expressiveness

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Expressed Emotion

• Detecting and Computing emotion
• Eyebrows can signal distress, worry (inner eyebrows lifted), and fear (eyebrows raised)
• Genuine natural smiles are marked by activate muscles under the eyes and raised cheeks

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Expressed Emotion

Detecting and Computing emotion

• People can be trained to detect emotions and lying in others
• In one study, college students, psychiatrists, court judges, police officers, and federal polygraphers were only about 50% correct in detecting liars
• In another study, trained service agents, clinical psychologists trained in lying research, and “street smart” LA and British police interrogators were about 70% correct

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Expressed Emotion

Facial expressions for basic emotions are culturally universal

Expressed Emotion

Display Rules

• Social aspects of emotion
• Western cultures encourage individuality and emotional expression
• Japanese people are more likely to hide their emotions
• Irish tend to be more expressive than Scandinavians

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Expressed Emotion

• Expressions not only communicate emotion, they also amplify and regulate it
• Frowning on purpose causes people to feel a little angry
• Students who were told to smile reported feeling happier, found cartoons funnier, and recalled happier memories than frowners

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Expressed Emotion

Infants’ naturally occurring emotions: joy, anger, interest, disgust, surprise, sadness, fear

Expressed Emotion

Fear

• Fear is adaptive: it's an alarm system that prepares our bodies to flee from danger
• Fear of injury can protect us from harm
• Through conditioning and observational learning, people can learn to be afraid of almost anything
• Based on previous experiences

Expressed Emotion

• The Amygdala--a neural key to fear learning
• We are biologically prepared to learn some fears more quickly than others

Expressed Emotion

• People who suffer from damage to the amygdala have difficulties recognizing, experiencing, and displaying emotions
• Phobias refer to intense fears of specific objects or situations
• Examples: claustrophobia (fear of tight spaces), arachnophobia (fear of spiders), agoraphobia (fear of social places)

Expressed Emotion

Anger

• often a response to friends' or loved ones' perceived misdeeds and was especially common when another person's act seemed willful, unjustified, and avoidable
• Anger can lead to physically or verbally aggressive acts, prejudice, health problems (chronic heart disease)
• Controlled expressions of anger are adaptive

Expressed Emotion

Catharsis

• emotional release
• catharsis hypothesis
• “releasing” aggressive energy (through action or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges
• Venting our anger can calm us temporarily
• However, expressing anger can lead to more anger

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Expressed Emotion

Happiness

• People who are happy perceive the world as safer, make decisions more easily, rate job applicants more favorably, are more cooperative, and live healthier and more energized and satisfied lives

Feel-good, do-good phenomenon

• people’s tendency to be helpful when already in a good mood

Expressed Emotion

Positive Psychology

• Psychology has mainly been focused on negative emotions (anger, anxiety, and depression) and mental disorders
• Recently, there has been an increased interest in positive emotions (positive psychology)

Subjective Well-Being

• self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life used along with measures of objective well-being
• physical and economic indicators to evaluate people’s quality of life

Expressed Emotion

Emotional Ups and Downs

• Human beings naturally rebound from bad moods and depression
• People with illnesses are just as likely to report feeling happy
• “We overestimate the duration of emotions and underestimate our capacity to adapt”

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�Expressed Emotion

Moods across the day

Expressed Emotion

Wealth and Well-being

• Money is only a determiner of happiness when it brings people out of poverty
• Losing money has more of an emotional impact (“Bad is stronger than good”)
• In the long run, having more money does not have a long-lasting effect on happiness
• Average personal income has been increasing, but the percentage of people who report being very happy has remained the same

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Expressed Emotion

Changing materialism

Expressed Emotion

Does money buy happiness?

Expressed Emotion

Values and life satisfaction

Expressed Emotion

Adaptation-Level Phenomenon

• tendency to form judgments relative to a “neutral” level
• brightness of lights
• volume of sound
• level of income
• defined by our prior experience
• Imagine that you are promoted and feel very happy, then you get used to it and return to your “neutral level”

Expressed Emotion

Relative Deprivation

• perception that one is worse off relative to those with whom one compares oneself
• happiness also depends to how we compare ourselves to others
• seeing other people promoted will inflate one's own expectations, which can lead to disappointment
• People usually compare themselves to others who are at or above their current level
• For example, rich people compare themselves to richer people and feel like they need to make more money

Happiness is...

Expressed Emotion

Emotional Regulation

• The ability to regulate and control one’s emotions
• Requires a lot of cognitive effort
• Anger management, coping with depression or heartbreak
• Related to EQ (emotional intelligence)