Emotions

Emotion definitions: Kleinginna & Kleinginna (1981)

Found up to 92 different definitions of emotions in their review.

Emotion lists: Fehr and Russell (1984)

- 200 students asked to list as many emotions as they could

-Top 5 emotions were (in order): Happiness, Anger, Sadness, Love and Fear.

- The words disgust, pride and boredom for example were listed less and rated as worse examples of emotions

What are the emotion variables that should allow us to distinguish emotions if they are basic and distinctive? (3)

- Bodily activity

- Facial patterns

- Apraisal/ orientation

William James (1898)

• Believes in autonomic specificity

• Also that ANS feedback is necessary for emotions

Perceived body reactions to emotions: Rimé et al. (1990)

- Participants to rank symptoms felt during emotions

- Found that perceived bodily changes seem to be emotion-speciifc

- Participants group different symptoms with different emotions such as anger with feeling hot, sadness with a lump in throat.

Emotion heat maps: Nummenmaa et al. (2014)

- asked participants to colour in silhouettes based on where they feel activates and deactivates during an emotion, where they feel most activity

- the heat maps were different for different emotions

- shows emotions are at least perceived to be felt differently

Measures of ANS (5)

- Electrodermal activity

- Respiration

-Heart-rate

-Blood pressure

-Pupil size

Measures moderately intercorrelate

Autonomic differences between anger and fear: Ax (1953)

• Participants to receive electric shocks in finger

  • fear condition- sparks start flying from machine and experimenter says there is a dangerous short circuit

  • anger condition- technician called in tofu equipment and starts being rude to participant

• Found that

  • fear had more skin conductance, more respiration acceleration

  • anger had high rise in blood pressure, higher muscle tension

• So did find slightly different autonomic profiles

Evaluation of Ax’s fear and anger shock study (1953)

• may have elicited anger and fear of different intensities which would as a result may provide different response patterns

• ANS not purely an emotional system, muscle tension may have been for the participants to brace themselves for the shock etc., not just because of anger

ANS reaction to induced emotions: Ekman, Levenson & Friesen (1983)

• Asked participants to either relive an emotion (30s) or directed them to relax and tighten face muscles to produce expressions

• Were able to design a tree that could separate emotions:

  • low HR- happy, disgusted, surprised

  • high HR and skin temp- angry

  • high HR and low skin temp- scared, sad

Evaluation of Ekman, Levenson & Friesen (1983)

• Only found 3 consistent differences between the 6 different basic emotions on 5 different ANS indices. (HR higher for fear and anger than happiness, less skin temp increase for happiness than anger)

Emotion induction techniques: McGinley and Friedman (2017)

• looked at the different emotion induction techniques: film, imagery, and recall

• found that the different techniques induces different responses in the same emotions

• so it seems as if the induction techniques have an effect on the responses and they are not locked to the emotions themselves

• also found that fear could be predicted with 37% accuracy from ANS activity but sadness could not be predicted with a higher than chance accuracy

• Self-report measures allowed for much higher accuracy in classification of emotions (fear ~84%, and sadness ~92%)

Why might it be difficult to see autonomic specificity in lab studies? (4)

• not able to induce emotions that are strong enough

• not able to induce ‘pure’ emotions for long enough

• emotion categories may not be specific enough

• our measures of emotions may not be the ‘right’ ones, we measure things that are easy to such as HR, and skin conductance

Arguments for autonomic specificity (2)

• makes sense that different emotions feel different because of variable ANS responses

• allows us to perform different actions in response to challenges or threats, evolutionarily adaptive

Arguments against autonomic specificity (2)

• actions required by emotions are not always the same. we may react similarly to different emotions and differently to similar emotions

• lack of empirical support for specificity in the literature

Levels of specificity: Stemmler (1989)

argues that there are different levels of specificity

• emotion non-specificity- no specificity between emotions, one extreme

• context-deviation specificity- context affects the physiological response, emotion can change the pattern/ intensity, midpoint

• absolute emotion specificity- all emotions have specific ANS response, other extreme

Autonomic feedback theory

• states that autonomic feedback is what causes emotions

• autonomic responses:

  • must precede an emotion

  • are sufficient to make up an emotion

Arguments against sufficient of ANS feedback: (Cannon, 1927)

• sensory feedback is course, receptors are insensitive and so not enough detail to produce distinct emotions

• autonomic specificity is not supported by evidence so how could it be that ANS responses cause different emotions

• inducing ANS responses without emotional stimuli does nor produce emotions as this theory may predict

Arguments against necessity of ANS feedback for emotions: (Cannon, 1927)

• ANS feedback reaches the brain too slowly compared to how rapidly we can observe emotions

• Animals who have had their SNS system separated from the brain still show learned emotional behaviour however does interfere with acquisition of new ones (Wynne & Solomon, 1955)

Two-factor theory: Schachter (1964)

believed ANS activity is necessary for emotions but that cognitive factors are also necessary.

intensity of autonomic activation and the quality of cognitions about the situations both factor into the emotional state that is experienced

Adrenaline experiment: Schachter and Singer (1962)

• recruited pps for ‘vitamin’ injection study and had them do perceptions tasks

• injected with either saline or adrenaline

• some pps warned the jab had specific side effects, some warned about nondescript side effect and some not warned at all

• after jab, pps sat in waiting room w/ a confederate who was either trying to elicit euphoric emotion by playing around or angry emotion by acting outraged at intrusive questions in the questionnaire that the pps had to fill out

• pps to self-report emotions

• adrenaline informed group reported least happiness

• no difference between placebo, ignorant and misinformed groups

facial functions (3)

action preparation- happen when we prepare to deal with situational demands

emotion expression- e.g. Ekman says there are at least 6 basic emotions attached to distinct facial configurations

signalling motives- e.g. Fridlund says they are used to express social motives to influence those around us

spontaneous facial expression: Landis (1924)

• 25 pps

• took picture during activities meant to elicit different emotions such as sawing head off live rat, listening to jazz dance music etc.

• found no relationship between the facial expressions made and what the events were meant to elicit/ what the pps reported they felt

Issues with spontaneous facial expression study: Landis (1924)

• the emotions elicited by the situations may not have been pure or the same for everyone (mixed emotions etc.)

• used photos to record emotions, only captures on small moment

• pps knew they were being observed so they may have regulated their expressions

  • this would work form Ekman’s theory of facial expressions but maybe not for Fridlund’s)

• unethical

emotion expression meta-analysis: Durán et al. (2017)

• meta-analysis of studies testing the relationship between emotion and facial expression

• found 0.35 (weak) correlation between emotion and facial expressions

Ekman’s neurocultural theory (1972)

says that display rules (cultural and social expectations/rules) may lead us to regulate facial expressions in the presence of others

Fridlund facial configurations

• facial configurations (expressions) are there to signal intentions to others

• so they do not need to happen when we are not in the presence of others

bowling alley smiles: Kraut and Johnston (1979)

• observed player smiles after hitting the pins from either behind the pins or behind the seats

• recorded smiles right after pal passed the pins and when they turned to face friends

• smiles happened significantly more when facing friends

• did not distinguish between what are deemed as genuine smiles (Duchenne smiles, crinkled eyes) and just polite smiles as Ekman describes

olympic smiles: Fernandez-Dols et al. (1995)

• footage of 1992 olympic medal ceremony

• measured polite and genuine smiles at:

  • stage 1: waiting behind podium (alone)

  • stage 2: standing on podium (in public)

  • stage 3: listening to national anthem looking at flag (away from public)

• most genuine smiles found during public stage 2

do facial configurations express emotion?

• not much evidence that an emotion is necessary to produce a configurations associated with it

• other factors of facial configurations also have a role (social motives, action preparation etc.)

forced choice methods of emotion-expression matching

• pps given posed images and a list of emotions to match to the images

• accuracy = % of pps who match each image correctly

• random guesses would yield ~17% accuracy

• not really genuine accuracy given they are choosing from a finite list and also eliminating entries from the list as they match

basic emotion recognition in forced choice tasks

• the 6 basic emotions are recognised at above chance accuracy (significantly) in non-isolated cultures

  • this may be due to social learning from exposure to Westerners although even isolated tribes show accuracy (Ekman, 1969)

Borneo and New Guinea: Ekman (1969)

• isolated tribes asked to do the forced choice expression and emotion task

• isolated = not much exposure to Westerners

• significantly above chance accuracy in matching images to emotions

Recognition accuracy of emotion expressions: Russell (1994)

• looked at Ekmans isolated tribes studies

• saw that some emotions were more accurately matched/recognised than others (happiness most, disgust least)

• so he argues they cannot all be basic, how could one be more basic and recognisable than another?

• suggests that people aren’t identifying an emotion by its expression but rather other factors like how pleasant they are (which would make sense as to why happiness was recognised at a high accuracy)

• remote cultures perform worse than close ones showing there must be some sociocultural component

Spanish and small-scale expression identification: Crivelli et al. (2016)

• pps from Spain and from Trobriander

• asked ‘point at the [basic emotion] face’

• Trobriander pps performed significantly worse than Spanish pps (sometimes chance level)

  • in some trials the trobriander pps pointed at a neutral face when asked to point at a happy one

same face, new body: Aviezer at al. (2008)

• showed pps image of faces attached to body for more context and asked pps to identify emotions

• switched the bodies but kept same face and found that emotions were identified differently based on what the body was doing

  • e.g. holding up a post, holding a nappy, standing by a gravestone

facial vs autonomic feedback

• cannon (1927) does not believe in autonomic feedback as a way of explaining emotions

• facial expressions can be more differentiated, quicker and detailed

• some argue that facial expressionism cause or influence emotions

facial feedback image study: Laird (1974)

• asked pps to relax or contact certain muscles (they were not told what expressions they were supposed to be making)

• slides of either KKK members or children playing were shown

• pps reported their emotional state after each trial

• higher rates of ‘elation’ reported in the smile condition for both KKK and child slides

• there may have been demand characteristics that were not identified in the post study interview

• could also be because frowning is more effortful and uncomfortable

facial feedback film study: tourangeau et al. (1979)

• manipulated pps faces like Laird to make:

  • fear expression

  • sad expression

  • effortful grimace

  • unmanipulated

• showed pps different films:

  • scary

  • sad

  • neutral

• found no significant effect of facial expression on emotion felt

issue with facial feedback studies: Tomkins (1981)

• says staged facial expressions (which are still) do not provide the right feedback for emotions

• however, this makes the facial feedback quite difficult to test by this metric

pout or smile facial feedback study: Strack (1988)

• asked pps to hold pens in their mouth with either their lips (pouting) or their teeth (smiling)

• then asked them to rate how amused they were by cartoon strips and how amusing the cartoon strips were

• higher amusement reported when holding the pen with teeth but higher ratings of funniness when holding with lips (not significant)

• replications of this study have failed

BOTOX facial feedback study: Finzi et al. (2014)

• injected BOTOX into forehead and brow muscles

• found that pps with major depression has greater symptom improvements than pps who had placebo injection after 6 weeks

• obvious if you got the placebo

• changes appearance as well as feedback, may make you feel better about yourself

• may lead others to treat you differently if your appearance changes or you become more confident

BOTOX studies review: Coles et al.

• reviewed facial feedback BOTOX studies

• found that those not funded by drug companies did not show significant results