Social Psychology of emotions 1

What is an emotion?

Multi-componential and different from a mood:

• Brief

• Arousal: involve physiological changes e.g. sweaty pals, heart rate, blush, facial movements, goose bumps

• Appraisal: specific, “aboutness” (has an eliciting event)

• Motivate action to help with individual and social goals

Emotions involve physiological changes

Silvers & Haidt (2008)

• Recent mothers watched a funny or inspiring film

• Roughly 50% reported no arousal

• Others experienced crying, goosebumps, induced nursing and warmth in chest

Feedback theory (James, 1884)

• James contrasts his feedback theory with what our commonsense understanding might tell us about the causes of our emotional experiences

• Something happens to your body, recognise that and show the emotion

Two-factor “appraisal” theory (Schacter, 1962)

• Construal of the world that allows them to label and differentiate their experiences

• E.g. immediate stimulus (adrenaline injected) - bodily response (arousal - heart rate increase) - appraisal of context (other person is irritating or funny) - subjective emotion (angry or happy)

Other appraisal theories (Arnold, 1960)

• Appraisal theories are closer to what James labelled our ‘common-sense’ understanding of emotion

• Propose that emotions are brouhgt about when some ‘thing’ in the world (event, object, person, group) is appraised as in someway important, relevant, or exciting to us

• Cognitive aspect of emotions

Fast and slow appraisals in the brain (Ledoux, 1996 - The emotional brain)

Danger-detection system

Low-road = thalamus to amygdala pathway (unconscious appraisal)

• Fast but makes lots of errors e.g. reacts to ‘snake-like’ objects

High-road = thalamus to sensory cortex (conscious appraisal)

• Slow but accurate e.g. “it’s just a tree branch”

This model may be specific to threats/fear and relating to coping events

Appraisal theory: Smith & Lazarus, 1993

Primary appraisal (elicit arousal and engage attention - low road)

• Motivational relevance -is it relevant to me or not?

• Motivational congruence - is it consistent with my goals or not?

Secondary appraisals (assess available resources and coping options - high road) - regulating and understanding more about the event

• Accountability/agency - is someone/thing else to blame or am I?

• Problem focused coping potential - can I do something to bring this in line with my interests?

• Emotion focused coping potential - can I change how I think or feel about this?

• Future expectancy - is this situation likely to change for better or worse?

Conceptual Act Model of Emotion (Barrett, 2006)

People construct emotions from:

• Core affect (arousal and valence) AND

• Conceptual knowledge of which emotion occurs in which circumstances (akin to appraisals)

• E.g. fear is I’m feeling threatened or the person looked angry; anger if I’m feeling I was treated unfairly

• People construct their emotion experiences by attending to different aspects of the situation (individual differences)

Are there basic emotions?

• There is a view that there are a small number of basic emotions (natural kinds), biologically hard-wired by evolutionary processes into the brains and nervous systems of all human, scross cultures and history

• One list includes: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust - each with their own unique facial expression, physiological profile and antecedents

• All other emotions, according to basic emotion theorists, are secondary emotions i.e. blends of these basc emotions e.g. contempt is a blend of disgust and anger

“Universal” Emotion Expressions

Ekman & Friesen (1971)

• Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and USA posed facial expressions

• Participants had to give faces description from 6 emotion terms

• 80-90% accuracy

• Could you reliably identify the m=emotion if not given list?

Identifying emotion is context dependent

• Context dominates our perception of emotion (Carroll & Russell, 1996)

• Gives the perceiver more information than the face alone

• Knowledge of the context helps disambiguate the expression - e.g. uncropping a photo or editing someone in different location

Basic emotions?

• Context dominates our interpretation of emotion displays (Carroll & Russell, 1996)

• Accuracy decreases significantly when spontaneously generated facial expressions are used (“posed” expressions may be symbols rather than signals that represent the true state of the emoter) - not actually experiencing these emotions

• People’s facial expressions differ significantly within prototypic emotion-eliciting events (Russell et al., 2003)

• No clean neural or physiological distinction between different reported ‘emotions’ - e.g., amygdala activity responds to arousal levels across fear, happiness, and sadness scenarios

How do emotions affect our behaviour and judgement?

1. Feelings as information (Schwartz, 1990)

2. Appraisal carryover (Lerner et al., 2004)

3. Emotion induced short term changes in behaviour can have long term efefcts (via the formation of behavioural routines) e.g. you feel angry about your friend not paying you back, so next time they ask you for a favour you decline, this distrust of your friend can become routine even when the anger dissipates

Feeling as information

Affect heuristic: We use preexisitng feelings to inform novel and complex judgements

• Respondents reported lower life satisfaction when it was overcast but only when they weren’t attending to the weather

• Affected their emotions when not asked about the weather

• Don’t realise to discount the role of weather in their judgement

Appraisal carryover

• Not only arousal, appraisals can incidentally influence our judgements

When do emotions inform judgements?

• When not really attending to it - otherwise people discount their emotion as influencing their judgement

• When the judgement is complex (Forgas, 2000) - Not so much when the judgement is simple or preexisting knowledge is available to guide judgement e.g. do you want oat milk in your coffee?

Social functionalist accounts of emotion

Keltner & Haidt, 1999

Emotions are functional (instrumental and communicative), not just for the individual but for social systems - help people achieve goals

Emotions as functional at four levels:

• Individual

• Dyadic (interpersonal)

• Group (within and between groups)

• Cultural

What functions do emotions serve at an interpersonal level?

Keltner & Haidt (1999) suggested that at an interpersonal level emotional responses:

• Help individuals know ohers’ emotions, beliefs and intentions (communicative function, modulated by presence of others)

• Evoke complementary and reciprocal emotions in others (emotional contagion)

• Serve as incentives or deterrents for other individuals’ social behaviour

Emotional expressions are social phenomena 1

Facial expressions as communicative displays (Fridlund, 1991)

• Facial expressions communicate adaptively relevant information to others (often involuntarily)

• E.g. disgust face arguably communicates distaste or the presence of noxiosu stimulus

• Consequently, such expressions have been maintained by evolutionary processes (e.g. muscle structures in the face) - because of how important it is to attnd to that

• So too is the ability to decode the meaning of facial expressions - though not without errors (context dominance)

Emotional expressions are social phenomena

Social regulation of facial expressions (Manstead & Fischer, 2001)

• Oftentimes it may not benefit us to communicate our behavioural intentions to others

• Emotion regulation depends on how we think others will appraise our expressions

• E.g. if someone has bad BO you might suppress disgust face and offer a plite, non)Duchenne (‘posed’) smile

Emotional expressions modulated by presence of others: Evidence?

Audience effects

• Kraut & Johnston (1979): Ten-pin bowlers and smiling

• Meadured the frequency with which bowlers: smiled both when they were facing the pins and when they were facing their friends

• From 116 observations there were 36 smiles when bowler faced friend and just 4 when facing the pins

• Further, smiling was independent of the score achieved (even though the score should be the smile-eliciting event at the individual level)

• Demonstrates that smiling is a social display

• Another sudy where olympic medal ceremonies were examined people smiled the most when they received their mdelas - people smile more in interpersonal situations

Evokes reciprocal and complementary emotions

Emotion contagion (Hatfield et al., 1994) - reciprocal emotion expression

• Simply hearing people laug can induce smiles and laughter (Provine, 1992)

• Moderated by affiliation/interpersonal characteristics

• More likely to blush when we see a friend blush than stranger (Shearn et al., 1992)

• Roommates who reacted similarly to emotional film clips had closer friendships over one year

Emotion contagion: how does it work?

Hatfield et al., 1994

• We are constantly monitoring the facial expressions and non-verbal behaviours of others

• If nothing else gets in the way, then emotion contagion works in a similar way to feedback theory: we see someone else smiling, we smile in return, we perceive our smiling and so interpret this as meaning that we feel happy

Anger: An interpersonal emotion?

Keltner & Haidt’s (1999) criteria:

• Help individuals know others’ emotions, beliefs and intentions

• Evoke complementary and reciprocal emotions in others

• Serve as incentives or deterrents for other individuals’ social behaviour

Does anger meet these functional criteria?

Anger expressions

Expressed anger:

Makes our beliefs and intentions clear

• Anger is associated antagonism, aggression, retribution, and disapproval (“action tendencies”; Frijda, 1986)

• The presence of an anger expression enhances belief that someone disapproves of an action; not as true for disgust (Piazza and Landy, 2020)

Anger evokes reciprocal and complementary responses

Recall

Primary appraisals concern motivational relevance and congruence:

• Relevance: Does the persons’s anger matter to you?

• Congruence: Is it at odds with what you’re doing?

Secondary appraisals concerns e.g. accountability:

Who is to blame for their anger?

• Them: causes you anger (reciprocal emotion)

• You: causes you guilt or fear (complimentary emotion)

Anger acts as deterrent for other individuals’ social behaviour

Two findings:

• High-power individuals who display anger are more likely to get their way and prompt subordiante, appeasement displays, making them less vulnerable to exploitation

• People infer ‘power’ from anger displays and often reats with ference/appeasement (Tiedens, 2001)