Emotion





Emotion: relatively short-term responses to an eliciting event involving changes in feelings, thoughts, behavior, and physiology.



Feelings - the subjective state of our current state

  • good, bad—positive, negative

  • excited, nervous


Moods - global—LONG LASTING—background affective state

  • doesn’t need to be caused by an eliciting event

    • Depressed


Emotions are functional:

  • Making meaning of things/the situation

    • Feeling shitty about failing a test, realize you want to do better; change behavior to study more.

    • How much we greive reminds us of how much we missed the thing

  • Direct our attention/what we need to pay attention to—if we’re safe or not

    • helps us understand the situation based on the emotions of other people

  • Behavioral drive—let us know how to navigate certain experiences

  • Social communication—communicate and understand other people


Basic Emotion Theory - humans posses a small number of innate, universally recognizable, emotions. These emotions have evolved to solve universally adaptive behvaiors

  • fear = esscape

  • joy = engage in positive behaviors

Automatic and involuntary. Consistent across all humans and all cultures. They all have a specific signature (how ur body repsonses to sadness vs. happiness)

If you felt any of the other emotions, they are just a subset from one of the main 7:

happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, surprise, contempt



We interpret facial expressions based on other context—body language, social context

  • true for very intense emotions


The Basic Emotion Theory is faulty bc it describes that emotions activate automatically, we have no control over them, everyone has them and only those 7, and exeryone experiences them the same; IT DOES NOT ACCOUNT FOR OUTSIDE CONTEXT


~ But it’s how we talk about it with other people—it’s easy to understand and a lif-toff point to greater comprehension.


SPECIFIC BRAIN SIGNATURES FOR SPECIFIC EMOTIONS DO NOT EXIST

Constructed Emotion Theory: emotions are NOT basic, universal, in-built programs. They are ways that our brain makes sense of all the changes we experience in response to an eliciting event.

  • bodily responses based on information from past experiences.

  • predictions based on bodily response

    • the same bodily response for fear and excitement but they are different emotions—because maybe we like rollercoasters but don’t like bears.