F25 - Emotion Seminar

Dr. Warren's Class

What roles does emotion play?

A ton, relevant for physical and mental conditions, affects longevity, decisinmaking, relationships, and social behavior

What IS Emotion?

Common Sense approach

• Reactions that have a physiological (brain or other) component

• Distinct, bounded mental events

• Happen without effort, without a sense of personal agency or control
  

“Natural Kind” model

• Distinct signature for each emotion

  • Distinct feeling, facial expression, autonomic change, verbal bx

Are these approaches scientifically sound?

Some Definitions of Emotions

Emotion refers to a feeling state involving thoughts, physiological changes, and an outward expression or behavior.

Emotions(or emotional systems) are distinct, integrated psychophysiological response systems …

An emotion contains three differentiable response systems:

(1) a prototypic form of expression (typically facial),

(2) a pattern of consistent autonomic changes, and

(3) a distinct subjective feeling state (Watson & Clark, 1994)

Each emotion has unique features:

Subjective feelings, expressive motor behavior, cognitive appraisals and styles, physiological arousal and the readiness to take particular action (Leventhal & Scherer, 1987).

The Elusive Definition of Emotion

Definitions of emotion are generally vague and highly variable

• How researchers define emotion usually incorporates their approach to studying emotion

  • e.g., self-report vs heart rate vs facial expression

Problem: Researchers differ in what they believe causes an emotion to occur in the first place

• E.g., When we encounter a situation that scares us, do we become aroused and from this state of arousal deduce that we are scared? Or do we decide mentally that the situation is scary, which then causes our physiology to react?

Characteristics of Emotions

Emotions do not last long and have a short duration. Mood, on the other hand, tends to last longer

• Time duration is a matter of debate

Emotional experience can act as a motivation for action.

• The disgusted diner, for example, sending his uncooked steak back to the chef and putting his coat on to leave the restaurant.

Characteristics of Emotions Cont.

Emotional experience is elicited in part by conscious mental assessments. Such perceptual assessment can lead to very different emotional expressions.

• Getting an annual bonus might bring joy, which might turn to anger when you learn your co-workers all got bigger bonuses than you. Therefore, cognitive appraisal is central to emotional experience

Emotional experience is either positive or negative, pleasant or unpleasant to us

What are the Functions of Emotions?

1. They are a source of information

2. They prepare us for action

3. They help us communicate with others, e.g. facial expressions and attachment

4. They regulate social behaviour

5. They can create cognitive bias and maintain self-esteem

Theories of Emotion: Evolutionary, Appraisal, and Constructionist

Antecedents - what causes them

Biological givens – innate emotional capacities

Integration of emotional experience - how components of emotion fit together

Evolutionary Theories of Emotion

Assumption that emotions are biologically based and provided adaptive advantages for the organism experiencing over evolution.

Emotions increased the chances of individual survival because they are appropriate problem-solving responses to challenges posed by the environment.

For example, our ancestors faced a multitude of adaptive problems—evading predators, gathering food, finding shelter, and attracting mates (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992).

Darwin’s Approach to Emotions

Darwin demonstrated that emotions in humans and other animals are similar.

Most of the similarities he found were between species closely related, but he found some similarities between distantly related species as well.

He proposed the idea that emotional states are adaptive, and therefore only those able to express certain emotions passed on their characteristics.

• Human emotions reflect animal signals

  Sneering – revealing teeth – bite threat

Emotions are Evolutionarily Adaptive

Darwin speculated that our ancestors communicated with facial expressions in the absence of language. Nonverbal facial expressions led to our ancestor’s survival

Basic emotions criteria - Ekman & Cordaro (2011)

Innate rather than acquired

• expressed and recognized across different cultures

Arise from the same circumstances for all people

• automatic

Expressed uniquely & distinctively

• Unique set of facial expressions

Evoke a distinctive and highly predictable physiological response

The Many Faces of Emotion

Paul Ekman studied facial expressions in an attempt to determine if emotions are innate (i.e., biologically driven) or culturally based

Our facial muscles -- there are 44 of them -- are able to communicate important nonverbal messages in a split second

Developed the Facial Affective Coding System (FACS)

Basis of Emotional Experience: Physiology or Cognition?

At one extreme, emotions can be seen as biological responses to situations over which we have little control

At the other extreme, there are psychologists who define emotions more by the conscious experience rather than by the biological response (Lazarus, 1991)

Biological Explanations of Emotion

Theorists such as William James and Carl Lange suggest that emotional experience is a direct result of physiological arousal

For some, physiological arousal is seen to cause the emotion (James & Lange); while for others, such arousal is a signal system for the brain to act and produce emotions (Cannon-Bard)

James-Lange Somatic Theory of Emotions

The body informs the mind (we know we are sad because we cry)

Distinctive body changes/symptoms are accompanied by different emotions

Perception of these changes/symptoms determines the experience of emotion

Differences between emotions are a direct result of the different patterns of physiological response associated with them

Challenge to the James-Lange Theory: The Cannon-Bard Theory

Emotional encounters are emergency situations which directly trigger a central brain process in the thalamus. Which lead to two simultaneous but independent outcomes:

• heightened arousal system which prepares the body to cope with the emergency

• the conscious experience of the emotion is registered in the cortex

Cannon-Bard argues the James-Lange theory is too slow in accounting for instantaneous emotional feeling

Some Evidence for the Physiological Basis of Emotion

Levenson, Ekman & Friesen (1990) reported patterns of autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity for anger, fear and disgust

Rimm-Kaufman & Kagan (1996) have reported that hand and face temperatures were different in a sample of females viewing different film clips

Facial feedback hypothesis of emotion (Davis & Palladino, 2000)

Can we Judge our own Arousal?

Two other theories of emotion point to how inaccurate we are at our levels of physiological arousal

• False autonomic feedback (Valins, 1966)

  • cognitive interpretations of physiological feedback can influence emotional experience

• Excitation transfer theory (Zillman, 1978)

  • psychological theory that explains how arousal from one event can carry over and intensify emotional reactions to a subsequent event

Both theories suggest that there must be more to emotional experience than mere physiological arousal

Evaluation of the Biological Basis of Emotion

One major criticism – we are not very good at detecting our levels of physiological arousal

Physiological arousal can look the same for different emotions

• E.g., feeling nervous often feels similar to excitement

What happened to cognition??

• we appraise/evaluate situations...

Cognitive Appraisal Theories

Different individuals can experience different emotions in response to the same event or stimuli.

Schachter & Singer (1962, 1964) - Two-factor Theory

Emphasised the importance of both physiological and situational factors in determining emotion.

The basis of the theory suggested that autonomic arousal provided the energy and intensity of an emotion

In other words physiological arousal by itself could determine the quantity but not the quality of arousal

Proposed an element of cognitive attribution as the critical factor in emotional experience

We evaluate the situation in terms of recognising what emotion we should be experiencing

Comparison of the Theories of Emotion