Lecture 12- Theories of emotion

What is emotion?

• Lasts seconds or minutes, not hours or days

• Not affective disorders, or personality temperaments

• May be accompanied by facial expressions, physiological responses

• Not every emotion has positive results

How do moods differ from emotions?

Moods tend to be lower level, and longer lasting

What are the 5 components of emotion?

• Subjective feelings

  • Hard to measure in a lab setting- some emotions you can't induce ethically, for example

• Physiological responses (heart racing, sweating etc.)

  • Evolutionary roots- responses that helped with survival

• Expressive behaviour (facial expressions, laughter etc.)

  • Don't always show this, can differ between cultures, others' interpretations of our expressive behaviours can also differ

• Appraisal

  • Thinking about 'what does this mean for me and my goals?'

• Action tendencies

  • Tendencies that go with an emotion- e.g. running/escaping when you feel fear

Give 3 theories of emotion

1. Evolutionary

2. Appraisal

3. Psychological constructionist

When thinking about these theories, there are 3 important factors to consider. What are they?

1. Antecedents of an emotion- what causes them

2. Biological givens- innate emotional capabilities

3. The integration of emotional experience- how components of emotion fit together

Evolutionary approaches are based on…?

The writings of Darwin (1872)

• Observational approach; human and animal emotional expressions

What does the evolutionary perspective say about emotion?

Argued for universality and functional adaptation (including communication- e.g. seeing someone else show a disgusted expression when eating something tells us to avoid that food ourselves)

• Emotions arise when we detect a threat to survival, or an opportunity for reproduction

What do emotions do for us?

Evolutionary perspective- what are signal stimuli?

Things in our environment that indicate an adaptive problem (e.g. a high cliff, a potential mate)

Emotions associate with action tendencies. What does this mean?

• Make the person ready to perform certain actions as a result of the emotion

• Don't always perform these behaviours though- why they're called 'tendencies

What are basic emotions?

Innate, quick and automatically caused by signal stimuli

What makes an emotion ‘basic’?

• Universal expression

• Discrete physiology

• Presence in other primates

• Automatic evaluations of the environment

These basic emotions can __ to create __?

Combine, more complex emotions- e.g. fear and sadness can combine to create regret

• Also can think about emotions in terms of 'families'

• Some argument as to what goes in the 'basic emotions', however

There is evidence to suggest that emotions are __ and __ cross-culturally?

Recognised and produced

• Methodological concerns, however

Give some methodological concerns with Ekman’s research on the 6 basic emotions

• Concern about using a forced choice paradigm

• Facial expressions and emotion terminology- limited number of things you can choose

• People may be making lucky guesses- choosing the answer that's most likely because they've ruled out other options, not because they actually know

• Also, recognition isn't necessarily the same as understanding and production

Ekman also argued that there was a 7th basic emotion. What is it?

Contempt

• Feeling of dislike for (and superiority over) another person

• Differences between disgust and contempt- disgust is generally triggered by objects and sensory information, and is almost always negative, whereas contempt can involve feelings of power, for example

What was the procedure in Levenson et al.’s (1990) directed facial action task experiment?

Directed facial action task; participants asked to contract specific muscles in their face

• Allows expression of emotion, without specific reference to it

Measured change in heart rate and skin conductance for each of the 6 basic emotions

• Electrical conductance of the skin can increase when you sweat

What were the findings in Levenson et al.’s (1990) directed facial action task experiment?

Emotions show a different pattern of physiological response

• Replicated in Indonesian ppts who lived in isolation from Western Culture (Levenson et al., 1992)

What other physiology is important to consider when looking at the basic emotions (blood flow, neurotransmitters, reflexes)?

• Anger -> blood flow to the arms and hands (fight response)

• Fear -> blood flow to the legs and feet (flight response)

• Happiness -> neurotransmitter release, dampening the effects of negative emotions

• Disgust -> can trigger the gag reflex

Emotions as functional, adaptive responses

What are affect programs?

Signal stimuli → affect program → emotion

• Affect programs are innate, but can change to include knowledge gained through individual experience

• E.g. an affect program for fear would include increased heart rate and alertness, and relaxation and smiling for happiness

Sum up the evolutionary approach. What does it say are the antecedents of an emotion, biological givens and integration of emotional experience?

• Antecedents (what causes them); signal stimuli (threat to survival, opportunity to develop)

• Biological givens (innate emotional capabilities); basic emotions (universal, discrete physiology, automatic)

• Integration (how components of emotion fit together); affect programs (co-occurrence of emotion components)

What do appraisal theories say about emotions?

Very few stimuli cause the same emotion in everyone

• Emotions are determined by how an individual appraises their circumstances

• Not as simple as good vs bad, but occurs along dimensions

Why do the same circumstances cause different emotions?

What are appraisals?

Mental process which allows detection and evaluation of stimuli and how they affect your wellbeing

• Appraisals are thought to be unconscious and automatic

Appraisals occur along dimensions. What were the 5 proposed by Scherer (1984)?

1. Novelty- how novel is this thing?

2. Valence- is it good or bad? Should I approach or avoid?

3. Goal relevance- is this important to me/my goals? Does it impact them?

4. Agency- who caused this to happen? Can I control it?

5. Norms- has a social norm been broken?

What did Scherer and Ceschi (1997) do to look at dominant feeling states?

Participants who'd gone to the airport, who's baggage didn't come out on the conveyor belt

• Conducted an interview with these people

• Asked them how they felt before going to the baggage claim desk and after

Asked things like;

• 'Did you expect your baggage to be lost?'

• 'Do you think this is your fault? Who's fault is it?'

What did Scherer and Ceschi (1997) find in their study on dominant feeling states?

Lots of different emotions that people can experience following the same event (supports the argument of appraisal theory)

Found that people who started in a good mood often remained in a good mood

• And a lot of people's mood increased after speaking to the baggage claim agent (reappraising of the situation)

• Mood was generally sustained

 All appraisals aren't equally relevant to the production of emotion (goal relevance was especially important here)

Scherer (2001) argues for a distinction between primary and secondary appraisals. What is the difference?

Primary = fast, clear cut, innate

• Novelty and valence

Secondary = higher-order, learned

• Goal relevance, agency, norms

Unlike affect programs, appraisal theory says that all emotion components don’t necessarily…?

Occur together

• Stimulus → appraisal → emotion

• Studies are interested in how appraisals influence the following emotional expression

What did Reisenzein et al. (2013) find in terms of emotions and expressions?

Review of evidence of the relationship between reported feelings and appearance of specific facial expressions

• Emotions and expressions did not reliably co-occur

Sum up appraisal theories. What do they say are the antecedents of an emotion, biological givens and integration of emotional experience?

• Antecedents; specific appraisal patterns (can differ across people)

• Biological givens; valence and novelty appraisals

• Integration; components are independent

What do psychological constructionism approaches say about emotion?

'Emotions are not reactions to the world- you are not a passive receiver of sensory input, but an active constructor of your emotions'- Feldman Barrett, 2017

• Specific emotions are caused by applying learned categories to experience

Why is there huge variation in how emotions look and feel?

What is categorisation?

Mental processes by which we take experience and give it meaning

Categories are based on the individual’s…?

Learning history, culture and current context

• Contain varied examples- e.g. being asked to describe fear generally and the last time you experienced fear 

• Lots of different experiences of one emotion- can differ between people and contexts

• Can explain (and predicts) cross cultural variations

Use the psychological constructivism approach to explain how something can be interpreted across different contexts

E.g. stomach ache

• At dinner table- hunger

• GP waiting room- anxiety

• Taking bins out- disgust

Use the psychological constructivism approach to explain how two completely different feelings can have the same physiological profile

Both a reluctant date and the flu could be characterised by…

• Flushed face, trouble concentrating, butterflies

Evolutionary theory might argue that attraction and feeling sick should have distinct physiological profiles

Your brain constructed meaning from the situation

• Date = attraction? Rather than thinking that you might be ill

• Psychological constructions takes into account the overlap between these different things

Psychological constructivism- core affect is composed of two dimensions. What are they?

1. Valence; pleasant vs. unpleasant

2. Activation; activation vs deactivation

Can be a mood, an emotion, a symptom, or a body state

Give 2 clinical applications of the psychological constructivism approach

1. Alexithymia (difficulty in recognising and describing their emotions- more likely to categorise things as bodily states)

2. Anxiety, depression (might over categorise as moods)

What was the procedure in MacCormack and Lindquist’s (2019) study (psychological constructivism)?

Participants rated hunger, shown context image, then asked to rate pleasantness of pictograph

What were the findings in MacCormack and Lindquist’s (2019) study (psychological constructivism)?

With increasing hunger, increased unpleasantness ratings but only with negative context (image)

• Participants conceptualised their affect as negative feelings when made meaningful in a negative context

Hunger doesn't automatically create these negative feelings, but when given this negative context, more likely to rate it as unpleasant

What are the two core ideas in constructivist approaches to emotion?

1. Emotions don't have fingerprints (not like the basic emotion idea- no discrete physiological response- similar biological mechanisms for emotions, but our experiences and current context give rise to the individual expression of emotion)

2. The emotion you experience are not inevitable consequences of your genes

Sum up psychological constructionism. What does it say are the antecedents of an emotion, biological givens and integration of emotional experience?

• Antecedents; categorisation of affect responses

• Biological givens; core affect

• Integration; components are independent