Midterm 1 exp

Physiological Approaches

headed by William James, who focused on experience and the resulting changes in the ANS, the observance of which causes emotion

ex: we see a bear, skin goes cold, heart beats faster, and we run

Ekman definitions of emotion

Emotions are viewed as having evolved through their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life-tasks. each emotion has unique features: signal, physiology and antecedent events. each emotion also has characteristics in common with other emotions: rapid onset, short duration, unbidden occurrence, automatic appraisal and coherence among responses

Epicureans

based on the teachings of Epicurus (300 BCE), said that "one should live in a simple way and enjoy simple pleasures" to stay away from desires that elicited stress like wealth or fame

tldr; live pleasantly and moderately

Stoics

founded by Zeno of Citium (~300BCE) was more radical than Epicureans and taught that one should rid themselves of all desires and thus all emotions and that nearly all emotions were damaging to the self and the society

tldr; live so that rationality is the highest virtue

Descartes

claimed 6 fundamental emotions make up the soul, and was one of the first to argue that emotions serve important functions. he said in the same way that hunger and pain tell us about our bodily states, emotions tell us about the state of our souls

what were Descartes 6 fundamental emotions

wonder, desire, joy, love, hatred, and sadness

Psychoanalysis

Freud's theory of personality that attributes thoughts and actions to unconscious motives and conflicts; the technique is used in treating psychological disorders by seeking to expose and interpret unconscious tensions by bringing them to the patients consciousness

Phineas Gage

Vermont railroad worker who through a railroad spike accident suffered severe damage to his frontal lobe which caused him to be emotionally erratic and lacking in executive functioning. this case spurred on research about how specific brain regions affect emotions and cognitive functioning

Empathy

moderated by anterior cingulate cortex, and anterior insula and is defined by Tania Singer as "having an emotion, which is in some way similar to that of another person, which is elicited by observation or imagination of the other's emotion, and that involves knowing that the other is the source of one's own emotion"

Appraisal

the evaluation of an event which cues emotional responses

Emotion labor (Arlie Hochschild)

work that involves constructing emotions in oneself in order to induce them in others

ex: hospitality in flight stewardesses or Stanislavski's method acting

Superabundance

Darwinian term, animals and plants produce more offspring than are necessary merely to reproduce themselves

Variation

Darwinian term, each offspring is somewhat different than others, and differences are passed on by heredity

Selection

Darwinian term, those characteristics that allow better adaptation to the environment are selected because they enable survival, and hence are passed on

Intersexual Competition

one of the selection pressures, is the process by which one sex selects specific kinds of traits in the other sex

ex: women and men prefer mates of good character

Intrasexual Competition

one of the selection pressures, is the competition for mates within a sex

ex: stags lock horns and engage in battles that are at times violent in order to determine dominance and who has access to mates.

Adaption

genetically based traits that allow the organism to cope well with specific selection pressures, and to survive and reproduce

Environment of evolutionary adaptedness

a description of the environment to which human emotions became adapted as our species evolved during the six million years since the human line branched off from the line that led to chimpanzees and bonobos.

Fitness

the likelihood of surviving and reproducing successfully as told by the evolutionary approach

Chromosomes, Genes, DNA

the materials which are passed on from generation to generation in the perpetuation of that species. As humans, we are vessels of these things and the vehicles used to propagate them.

Imprinting

evolutionary biology theory created by Konrad Lorenz who used it to describe how baby geese know to follow their mothers shortly after being born. deemed attachment in humans, it allows a newborn to be comfortable with their caregiver which allows the caregiver to properly take care of the infant.

Secure Base

idea proposed by Bowlby who states that babies use caregivers as a physical marker of security from which they can explore with the knowledge that they will be able to retreat to their secure base if need be.

Dunbar's Hypothesis

laughter and conversation have replaced grooming as the glue that holds society together. she argues this because our group sizes tend to be roughly 150 which would take too much time with individual grooming, conversation allows us to interact with multiple people at a time.

Grooming

physical interaction used to build social bonds and sometimes to reconcile after angry interactions. chimpanzees spend roughly 20% of their time grooming

!Kung

a modern hunter gatherer group in south africa, where, like the chimpanzees there were complex social hierarchies and their emotions adapted to living in that way

Evolution of Compassion

focus on the darwinian approach and how we as a species have developed compassion in order to cohesively work together for survival

Ker vs Song

Catherine Lutz story about studying the emotional lives of a small pacific island peoples.

Ker- showing of happiness

Song- Justifiably angry (used not as actual anger but as a social responsibility to disapprove of anything that would disrupt the social harmony.

children werent supposed to show ker according to the islands social rules

Romanticism

era of western culture first introduced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in which emotions and emotional experiences where highly valued in personal life, politics, literature, and in philosophy

Cultural approach: Assumptions

assumption 1: emotions are constructed primarily by the processes of culture

assumption 2: emotions can be thought of as roles that people fulfill to play out culture-specific identities and relationships

practice vs potential

practice - refers to what actually happens in people's emotional lives, the day to day emotional experiences of people from different cultures do differ, often dramatically.

ex: certain cultures allow for public expression of emotions while others work hard to suppress them

potential - asking if people of different cultures, if put in an appropriate experimental situation, would be capable of showing certain universal emotional responses in terms of experience, expression and physiology (answer is probably yes)

Independent self

a self-construal that is also referred to as individualism where the person asserts their distinctiveness and independence and define themselves based on uniqueness, with focus on internal causes

Interdependent self

a self-construal that is also referred to as collectivist where the self is fundamentally connected with other people. status and identity are found through their place within the community and other collectives. emphasis is placed on social context and situational influences on behavior

Amae

japanese emotion that has no simple english translation. it is an interdependent attachment emotion based on full and complete acceptance of one person by another

Affect Evaluation Theory (Tsai)

states that emotions that promote specific cultural values and ideals are valued more and as a result should play a more prominent role in the social lives of individuals

Epistemology

ways of knowing, referring to knowledge structures and theories that guide thought, emotion, and behavior in domain-specific ways

Dialecticism

Principles of change, contradiction, context

Emotional complexity

the simultaneous experience of contradictory emotions, such as happiness and sadness, compassion and contempt or anger and love

Display rules

things that are thought to influence how and to whom it is appropriate to express different emotions

ex: pacific islander girl showing too much happiness

Ethnographies

in-depth descriptions of the social lives of members of a particular culture. they are typically written by anthropologists who have made intensive study of the history, language, practices customs and rituals of a people and who have lived among them for many years

Emblems

nonverbal gestures that directly translate to words

Illustrators

a nonverbal gesture that accompanies our speech, to make it vivid, visual or emphatic

ex: hand gestures

Regulators

are nonverbal behaviors that we use to coordinate conversation

ex: head nods, eyebrow flashes, and encouraging vocalizations of interest

Self-adaptors

nervous behaviors that lack seeming intentions, as if simply to release nervous energy

Markers of emotional expression

1st: expressions of emotion tend to last just a few seconds.

ex: a smile accompanying enjoyment will typcally start and stop within a span of 10 seconds

2nd: facial expressions of emotion involve involuntary muscle actions that people cannot deliberately produce and cannot suppress

ex: the facial expression of anger involves the action of the muscle that tightens around the mouth

3rd: human emotional expressions often have parallels in displays of other species

Principle of serviceable habit

a theory that states that expressive behaviors that helped individuals respond adaptively to threats and opportunities in the evolutionary past will reoccur in the future

ex: furrowed brow, which protects the eyes from blows, and exposed teeth, which in our ancestors signaled that they were about to attack

Principle of nervous discharge

states that excess, undirected energy is released in random expressions

ex: face ouches, leg jiggles, and the like

encoding

the experience of different emotions should be associated with the same distinct expressions in every culture

Principle of Antithesis

hold that opposing states will be associated with opposing expressions

ex: you will learn later that pride is signaled in dominant, size-expanding displays, whereas shame is signaled in submissive behavior

Decoding

people of different cultures should interpret these expressions in the same ways

Free response critique

one of the critiques of Ekman and Friesen's facial expressions theory that critiqued the researchers use of fixed answers rather than implementing free response which would have gathered a more accurate measure of the emotions that the participant thought was being displayed

Ecological validity

one of the critiques of Ekman and Friesen's facial expressions theory that pointed out that the expressions in the studies may not be those that people routinely produce or judge in their daily lives, they are highly stylised and exaggerated

Embarrassment as appeasement

information from the Keltner and Buswell study where a (typically subordinate) person uses a display of embarrassment to pacify and reduce the aggressive tendencies of another (typically dominant) individual. these displays resemble the appeasement displays of other species

Tongue bite

only recognized in India as a display of embarrassment

Pride

usually displayed through a widening of posture

ex: chest expansion, fists raised in the air

Vocal Burst

brief non-word utterances that arise between speech incidents

ex: shriek or growl to express fear or anger

Functions of Touch

1. touch soothes

ex: babies being cut then soothed by mothers touch

2. signal safety

ex: infants are able to gather information about safety through their mothers touch

3. increase cooperation

ex: chimpanzees use touch to encourage the trading of favors

4. provide pleasure

ex: handjobs

Informative function

emotional expressions provide rapid important information about the social world as well as signaling the senders relationship to the target

Evocative function

to trigger specific responses in perceivers

ex: matching or mirroring the emotions of others is an important basis of empathy, which is important in social life

Emotion accents

stylized and culturally specific ways of expressing emotions

ex: anger expression involves the furrowed brow, the glare, the lip tighten and the lip press

Natyasastra

hindu-indian treatise written by Bharata in 200BCE

Rasas

emotions that are distinctly aesthetic and each corresponds with an everyday emotion. they are the emotions elicited in the spectator by what they are seeing

ex: seeing an actor suffering and sorrowful produces the aesthetic emotion of compassion in the spectator

Flirting

Fore

Laughter

has been part of the human communicative repertoire for several million years and likely preceded language in evolutionary emergence

Parasympathetic ANS

the branch of the system helps with restorative processes, reducing heart rate and blood pressure and directing inner resources to digestive processes