Elements of Emotional Experience

Flashcards reviewing key vocabulary and concepts related to motivation and emotion, covering components of emotion, the role of the brain, cultural influences, and methods of measuring emotional responses.

Emotion

Can cause motivation; for example, anger about your work schedule may motivate you to look for a new job.

Motivation

Can cause emotion; for example, your motivation to win a photography contest may lead to great anxiety during the judging.

Emotion

Involves (1) a subjective conscious experience (the cognitive component), accompanied by (2) bodily arousal (the physiological component) and (3) characteristic overt expressions (the behavioural component).

Cognitive Component of Emotions

Relies on individuals' highly subjective verbal reports of what they are experiencing and indicates that emotions are potentially intense internal feelings.

Amygdala

Emotions are controlled by a constellation of interacting brain systems, but this appears to play a particularly crucial role.

Behavioural Component of Emotion

People reveal their emotions through characteristic overt expressions, such as smiles, frowns, wrinkled brows, clenched fists, and slumped shoulders.

Six Fundamental Emotions

Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust.

Facial-feedback hypothesis

States that facial muscles send signals to the brain and that these signals help the brain recognize the emotion that one is experiencing

Polygraph/Lie Detector

Records autonomic fluctuations while a subject is questioned; monitors key indicators of autonomic arousal, typically heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and galvanic skin response (GSR).

Emotion and Autonomic Arousal

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is divided into the sympathetic division, which mobilizes bodily resources in response to stress, and the parasympathetic division, which conserves bodily resources.

Affective Forecasting

People tend to mispredict their future feelings in response to good and bad events and tend to overestimate the emotional impact of future events.

Display Rules

Norms that regulate the appropriate expression of emotions and prescribe when, how, and to whom people can show various emotions; these vary from one culture to another.