Emotion & Cognition Lecture 1

Three core theoretical models

• Cognitive triangle/triad

• Biopsychosocial model

• The process model of emotion regulation (ER)

Cognitive Triangle/Triad

Biopsychosocial Model

Interplay between contextual risk factors, personal vulnerabilities and protective factors

Process Model of Emotion Regulation

• Shaping which emotions one has, when one has them, and how one experiences or expresses these emotions

• Core features of emotion regulation

  • Activation of a goal

  • Strategy: engagement to alter the emotion trajectory

  • Outcome: impact on emotion dynamics or modulation

Five Emotion Regulation Strategies

1. Situation selection

2. Situation modification

3. Attentional deployment

4. Cognitive change

5. Response modulation

Emotion Regulation in Infancy

• Situational factors: situation modification

  • The adult may change the situation, such as taking infant out of crib

  • Moving away from something scary.

  • By facial expressions (e.g., alarmed face), vocalization, or gesture.

  • At a later age: situation selection when able to actively approach or avoid.

• Attentional deployment

  • Often through distraction to make a situation less emotionally charged

  • By looking away, for older children or adults by focusing on other thoughts

• Response modification/modulation

  • Changing the emotional reaction e.g. relaxing, self-soothing behaviors

  • Suppression of certain emotions via “display rules” → role of culture

What is an emotion?

• A whole-body phenomena with connections between different processes: physiological, cognitive, behavioral

• Facial expressions as indicators of underlying emotional states → inferred indicators or appraisals of emotions of others

• Components of emotions:

  • Fysiology: arousal

  • Cognition: inferences/interpret

  • Behavior: crying, looking

Disgust: Example

• Innate:

  • Evolutionary preparedness, like disgust to ingest either living things or their by-products (e.g. hair)

  • Early disgust reaction becomes extended to a much broader set of stimuli after one year of age

• Learned:

  • Disgust in three domains: disease contamination, immoral actions, and choice of sexual partner and behaviors

Two theoretical approaches of emotions

• Functionalist

  • Signalling/communicating

  • Emotions are about our own appreciation of how the event relates to our person al goals (e.g. security, food)

• Differentiation

  • Physiological maturation

  • At birth: contentment, interest and distress

  • After 6 months: 6 basic emotions

  • After 18 months: more complex emotions possible

Undifferentiated vs. Differentiated

• Undifferentiated: Contentment, distress, interest:

  • Global state of positive well-being and a negative emotional satte of “not okay”

  • Makes quick assessments possible

• Differentiated: Basic emotions (e.g. joy, sadness):

  • After 6 mo. children can express 6 emotions

  • Understanding and showing on request develops later → dependent on cognitive development

Complex Emotions

•  Often combinations of basic emotions;

• Thousands of possible combinations;

• Develop over time, (more) dependent of opportunities from the

  environment.

• For instance:

  • Self-conscious emotions: guilt, shame, embarrassment, pride.

  • Moral emotions: sense of right and wrong, justice.

• Complex emotions are mental representations of emotions, cognitions and behaviours.

Complex Emotions: Embarrassment

• Realize that we stand out because we violated a social convention or simply are receiving unwanted attention

• It is not always in reaction to negative situation such as shame

• “Excessive praise can evoke embarrassment”

• You start to develop it as soon as you can recognize yourself in the mirror

Moral Emotions = Complex Emotions?

• Experiment helping and hindering

• Some aspects of morality seem to be present at a young age, like reaction to mean and nice behavior

Concepts related to developing emotions

• Recognizing emotions in others

• Emotional imitation and contagion

• Machiavellian emotions

• Negativity bias

Recognizing emotions in others

• From birth onwards: able to differentiate basic emotions in language, voice, etc.

• Social referencing: use emotional reactions of others as cues to interpret ambiguous situations (e.g. scary toys, visual cliff)

Emotional Imitation and Contagion

• Imitation: Making a similar facial expression, e.g. imitation just after birth

• Contagion: someone feels a particular emotion and you pick it up and feel the same way, e.g. sadness, joy

Machiavellian Emotions

• “End justifies the means”

• Emotion meant to influence others and not simply to reflect an internal state

• Often considered cold, calculating, functional

• Can also be seducing, jealous, “happy”

Negativity bias

• From infancy strong tendency to respond more powerfully and consistently

• Larger cost to ignore or misinterpret negative emotions;

• Sensitive to distress, fear in others → social referencing.

Negative Emotions: Some facts

• Very difficult to distinguish between negative emotions (sadness, disgust, anger, fear) in babies.

• Undifferentiated negative emotions have a strong signaling function (e.g., crying).

• Babies can switch quickly between anger or sadness in the same situation, or they express ambiguous negative feelings (e.g., baby with sneezing mother).

• Fear clearly expressed after 6 months (e.g., stranger anxiety).

• Evolutionary preparedness to fear certain animals/situations.