Psychology - Midterm 2

Emotion

A temporary state that includes unique subjective experiences and physiological activity, and that prepares people for action

Feelings vary on…

Valence - How positive the emotion is

Arousal - How exciting the emotion is

Appraisal

Conscious or unconscious evaluations and interpretations of the emotion-relevant aspects of a stimulus or event

Action tendencies

A readiness to engage in a specific set of emotion-relevant behaviors

James-Lange theory of emotion

Feelings are simply the perception of one’s own physiological responses to a stimulus

• According to this theory, our feelings are the consequence, and not the cause, of our body’s reactions to events in the world

• It cannot be right

  • Some of our emotional experiences happen before our bodily responses do

  • All sorts of things can cause bodily responses without also causing emotions.

• For the James-Lange theory to work, every human emotion would have to be associated with a unique set of bodily responses

Two-factor theory of emotion

Stimuli trigger a general state of physiological arousal, which is then interpreted as a specific emotion

Universality hypothesis

Suggests that all emotional expressions mean the same thing to all people in all places at all times

• Facial expressions of at least five emotions — anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness — are universal

• Expressions of a few other emotions — such as embarrassment, surprise, amusement, guilt, shame, and pride — may be universal as well

• Human beings show some agreement about the meaning of many emotional expressions, but that agreement is short of being universal

Facial feedback hypothesis

Suggests that emotional expressions can cause the emotional experiences they typically signify

• Emotions can cause expressions but expressions can also cause emotions

Display rule

A norm for the appropriate expression of emotion

• Techniques to obey display rules

  • Intensification involves exaggerating the expression of emotion, as people do when pretending to be delighted by an unwanted gift.

  • Deintensification involves muting the expression of one’s emotion, as athletes do when they lose their events but try not to look too disappointed

  • Masking involves expressing one emotion while feeling another, as judges do when they try to seem interested in, rather than contemptuous of, a lawyer’s argument.

  • Neutralizing involves showing no expression of the emotion one is feeling, as card players do when they try to maintain a “poker face” despite having been dealt a winning hand.

Motivation

The internal causes of purposeful behavior

Drive-reduction theory

Suggests that the primary motivation of all organisms is to reduce their drives.

• According to this theory, animals are not actually motivated to eat and don’t actually find food rewarding.

• Rather, they are motivated to reduce their drive for food, and it is the reduction of this drive that they find rewarding.

• A reinforcement is simply any “substance or commodity in the environment which satisfies a need, i.e., which reduces a drive”

Hedonic principle

People are primarily motivated to experience pleasure and avoid pain

Emotion regulation

The strategies people use to influence their own emotional experience

• Suppression - Inhibiting the outward signs of an emotion

• Affect labeling - Involves putting one’s feelings into words

• Reappraisal - The process of changing one’s emotional experience by changing the way one thinks about the emotion-eliciting stimulus

  • Best way

Language 

A system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar and that convey meaning.

• Language allows individuals to exchange information about the world, coordinate group action, and form strong social bonds.

Grammar

A set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages.

Phonemes

The smallest units of speech that distinguish one word from one another

Phonological rules

Indicate how phonemes can be combined to form words

Morphemes

The smallest meaningful units of language, created by phonemes 

Morphological rules

Indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words

Syntactic rules

Indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences.

4 stages of language acquisition

1. Babbling (4-6 months) - Production and detection of rudimentary speech sounds

• Parsing problem - Turning long speech sound into meaningful units

2. One word (10-12 months)

• Production and detection of words

• Social referencing

• Shared attention

• Gestures

• Novelty mapping

• Category assumption

• Linguistic context

3. Two word (18-24 months)

• Use syntax and telegraphic speech

4. Sentences (2+ years)

Theories of language development

• Behaviorist - We learn to talk in the same way we learn any other skill: through reinforcement, shaping, extinction, and the other basic principles of operant conditioning

• Nativist - Holds that language development is best explained as an innate, biological capacity

  • According to Noah Chomsky, the human brain is equipped with a universal grammar, a collection of processes that facilitate language learning.

• Interactionist - Holds that although infants are born with an innate ability to acquire language, social interactions play a crucial role in language.

Language production has been linked with which 2 areas of the brain?

1. Broca’s area

2. Wernicke’s area

(also associated with aphasia, difficulty in producing or comprehending language)

How are Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area connected? 

Connected to one another by a pathway known as the arcuate fasciculus; they are also interconnected with many other brain regions, as language is a complex process that cannot be simply localized to these two parts of the brain

Broca’s area

Located in the left frontal cortex and is involved in the production of the sequential patterns in vocal and sign languages

• Individuals with damage that includes this area exhibit Broca’s aphasia: they understand language relatively well, but they have increasing comprehension difficulty as grammatical structures get more complex.

• Their real struggle, though, is with speech production.

  • Typically, they speak in short, staccato phrases that consist mostly of content morphemes (e.g., cat, dog).

  • Function morphemes (e.g., and, but) are usually missing, and grammatical structure is impaired.

Wernicke’s area

Located in the left temporal cortex, is involved in language comprehension (whether spoken or signed)

• Individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia differ from those with Broca’s aphasia in two ways: They can produce grammatical speech, but it tends to be meaningless, and they have considerable difficulty comprehending language.

Right