Emotion, Affective Processes, Attitudes and Consistency – Quick Reference (Ch.6-7)
What is emotion?
Emotion: conscious, unified state tied to an event; mood: diffuse feeling not clearly linked to an event; affect: automatic evaluation of a stimulus as good or bad (liking vs disliking).
Positive affect vs negative affect are typically treated as distinct dimensions.
Emotions bridge mental and physical processes (feelings, arousal, bodily responses).
Conscious emotion versus automatic affect
Conscious emotion: felt as a strong, unified feeling state (e.g., anger, joy).
Automatic affect: quick, nonconscious liking/disliking toward something; can occur without awareness.
Both dimensions are important; one cannot determine which is more influential.
Emotions and arousal
Arousal: physiological activation (e.g., heart rate, breathing); linked to many emotions but not necessarily to automatic affect.
Arousal can be similar across different emotions, challenging simple one-to-one mappings between arousal and specific emotions.
James-Lange theory of emotion
Proposes bodily changes follow perceived exciting facts; feeling of changes creates emotion (bodily response → emotion).
Empirical support weak for distinct bodily patterns across emotions.
Led to facial feedback hypothesis: facial expressions can evoke or magnify emotions due to facial muscle activity influencing brain input.
Botox reducing facial feedback can impair recognizing others’ emotions.
Facial feedback hypothesis
SMILE vs FROWN manipulation can influence how much one enjoys stimuli.
Facial feedback may help in recognizing others’ emotions.
Schachter-Singer theory of emotion
Emotion has two components: physiological arousal and cognitive label.
Arousal is relatively nonspecific; cognitive label determines the emotion experienced.
The arousal channel can be mislabelled; context helps assign the correct emotional meaning.
Misattribution of arousal
Arousal from one source can be misattributed to another situational cause (excitation transfer).
Classic experiments show arousal from one event can intensify reactions to a subsequent event depending on label.
Real-world example: fear arousal on a bridge leading to increased attraction to an approaching person can be misattributed as love or attraction.
Two basic arousal states observed: pleasant and unpleasant; arousal from genuine events tends to be clearly good or bad.
Some important emotions
Happiness: linked to belongingness; influenced by comparisons and expectations; hedonic treadmill describes adaptation to life events.
Anger: signals approach/defensive action; can be adaptive for asserting rights or defusing conflict, but is heavily regulated across cultures.
Guilt vs. shame: guilt is about a specific action and can repair relationships; shame is about the self and is often destructive.
Disgust: avoidance of potential infection or moral violations; motivates health-protective behaviors; linked to moral judgments and purity norms.
Why do we have emotions?
Emotions promote belongingness and social bonds.
They communicate social information and guide behavior, thinking, and learning.
Anticipated emotions guide decisions, sometimes more than actual emotions.
Positive emotions counteract negative ones and build resources (broaden-and-build theory).
Emotions affect memory, learning, and decision making; they help prioritize information.
Emotions promote belongingness and social information
Emotions facilitate forming and maintaining relationships (e.g., weddings, acceptance into institutions).
Emotions signal when relationships are threatened (e.g., fear, sadness, anger).
Emotions can be contagious; people’s moods spread via social channels and social media.
Emotions guide thinking and learning; anticipation in decisions
Emotions shape how people process information and learn from mistakes.
Anticipated emotions can influence choices by forecasting future feelings (anticipatory regret, etc.).
Affective forecasting is often inaccurate; people overestimate duration and intensity of future emotions.
Affective forecasting and decision making
Anticipated regret can bias decisions toward the status quo to avoid possible future bad feelings.
Emotions can bias risk judgments (risk-as-feelings hypothesis).
Positive emotions broaden attention; negative emotions narrow attention.
Positive emotions counteract negative emotions; emodiversity
Broadening-and-building: positive emotions expand thought-action repertoires and build resources (intellectual, physical, social, psychological).
Positive moods improve flexibility, creativity, persistence; reduced risk taking in some contexts.
Emodiversity: variety of emotions experienced; higher emodiversity linked to better mental/physical health.
Group differences in emotion
Six basic facial emotions recognized cross-culturally: anger, surprise, disgust, happiness, fear, sadness (Ekman et al.).
Cross-cultural consensus in recognizing basic expressions; some cultural differences in display rules.
Gender differences: mixed evidence; large-scale daily-life studies often show little difference in emotional experience between men and women; some lab studies show stronger lab-reported emotions in women, but physiological measures often reveal little difference; men may show stronger arousal in some contexts.
Love: men often report loving earlier; women may report love differently; breakup distress can differ by gender.
Arousal, attention and performance
Yerkes-Dodson law: some arousal improves performance, but too much impairs it (inverted U-shape).
Curve is steeper for complex tasks; moderate arousal yields best performance.
Easterbrook's hypothesis: arousal narrows attention; under high arousal, performance can suffer due to missing relevant information.
Emotional intelligence (EI or EQ)
Definition: ability to perceive, generate, understand, and regulate emotions to foster thinking and growth.
Four components: perceiving, facilitating, understanding, managing emotions.
Higher EI linked to better affect forecasting, job performance, leadership, relationships, health; some evidence of a dark side (association with narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism in some contexts).
Affect regulation
Regulation helps manage emotional responses to maintain functioning.
Strategies include: doing things that produce positive affect (eating, exercise, listening to music); distraction; arousal control (caffeine, sleep, relaxation); seeking social support; problem-focused strategies (reframing, humor, perspective-taking); prayer.
Exercise often rated as highly effective; some strategies (like venting) can backfire.
Goals of affect regulation: enter/exit/prolong good or bad moods depending on context.
Prior to social interactions, people may regulate mood to optimize performance; context matters.
Gender differences in mood regulation: women may ruminate; men may distract themselves or use humor; differences in coping styles exist but averages show substantial similarity.
Is affect regulation safe?
Emotions are valuable for guidance; over-regulation can hamper social functioning.
Overly suppressing emotion can be detrimental; some emotional experience is necessary for adaptation.
The social side of sex and related constructs
Arousal can be physiological or sexual; brain-genital link may differ by gender; sexual arousal can be misinterpreted under certain conditions.
Mood and sexual decision making: sexual arousal can bias risk judgments and learning about contraceptive information.
Mood effects on eating (mood-congruent eating patterns): negative moods associated with unhealthy food choices; positive moods can increase flexibility and task engagement.
Money matters
Emotions influence financial decisions; disgust and sadness can alter willingness to buy/sell; disgust lowers selling price and willingness to pay; sadness tends to lower selling price but can increase willingness to acquire.
Background socioeconomic status affects risk-taking and impulsivity in spending.
What makes us human? Putting the cultural animal in perspective
Human emotion is tied to meaning and ideas; cognitive labeling (as in Schachter-Singer) allows emotions to be refined and differentiated.
Humans have vast emotional vocabularies; self-concept and culture shape emotion regulation and expression.
Emotion regulation is sophisticated in humans, facilitating social acceptance, culture, science, and philosophy.
Chapter 6 Summary (key points)
Emotions involve conscious experience and automatic affect; both are essential.
Arousal is a core component; theories differ on how arousal translates to emotion (James-Lange vs Schachter-Singer).
Positive emotions broaden attention and build resources; negative emotions focus attention and may aid learning.
Happiness is influenced by outlook and social connections; objective predictors have weak relationships with happiness; social bonds are the strongest predictor.
Guilt vs. shame: guilt tends to be constructive for relationships; shame often destructive.
Disgust motivates health-protective behaviors and can influence moral judgments.
Emotions guide thinking and learning, but they do not uniformly determine behavior; automatic affect can prompt quick reactions, while conscious emotion informs longer-term decisions.
Affective forecasting is often inaccurate in predicting future emotions.
Emotion and decision making interact with risk, memory, and learning; positive emotions can improve flexibility, problem solving, and resilience.
Emotional intelligence supports regulation and social functioning; the “dark triad” traits can co-occur with high EI in some contexts.
Affect regulation strategies and goals are context-dependent and can have varying effectiveness.
Humans uniquely integrate meaning, culture, and cognition into emotion.
Attitudes, beliefs and consistency (Chapter 7)
What are attitudes and why do people have them?
Attitudes: global evaluations toward objects or issues (like/dislike, approve/disapprove).
Beliefs: pieces of information about objects/issues (facts or opinions).
Automatic attitudes: fast, non-conscious evaluations; deliberate attitudes: reflective, controlled evaluations.
Dual attitudes: automatic vs deliberate attitudes toward the same object; can conflict.
Why people have attitudes
Humans live in complex environments requiring many attitudes to navigate choices and social interactions; attitudes ease decision making and action selection.
How attitudes are formed
Mere exposure effect: familiarity increases liking; exposure to stimuli (words, faces, etc.) increases favorable attitudes unless initial attitude is negative.
Embodied attitudes: bodily states can influence attitudes (e.g., head or body movements can influence agreement with messages).
Classical conditioning: attitudes can form via pairing neutral stimuli with positive/negative unconditioned stimuli.
Operant conditioning: attitudes shift with rewards/punishments for behaviours.
Social learning: people imitate attitudes and behaviours observed in others, especially when those others are rewarded.
Consistency of attitudes
Cognitive dissonance: inconsistencies between cognitions and behaviours create discomfort; people modify attitudes or behaviours to restore consistency.
Effort justification: hard-won outcomes lead to attributing greater value to the outcome.
Suffering for a group increases liking for the group (effort and social belonging).
Post-decision dissonance: after making a choice, people justify the chosen option to reduce dissonance.
Dissonance can be reduced by changing attitudes, rationalizing, or changing perception of alternatives.
Dissonance is often accompanied by arousal and social pressures (self-presentation and audience effects).
Do attitudes really predict behaviours?
The A-B problem: attitudes do not always predict behaviours well; better predictions occur when attitudes are specific, measured across time, consciously salient, and highly accessible.
Attitude–behaviour link is stronger for explicit, context-relevant attitudes and behaviours, and weaker for broad, general attitudes.
Beliefs and believing
Belief vs understanding: automatic belief often accompanies understanding; deliberate doubt can override automatic belief.
Belief perseverance: once beliefs form, they are resistant to change even when evidence contradicts them.
Coping and beliefs: beliefs help people cope with trauma by downward comparison, restoring self-esteem and control, and finding meaning or purpose (including religious beliefs).
Assumptive worlds: people hold beliefs about how the world should be; misfortune can threaten these beliefs, and coping involves restoring or reframing them.
What makes us human? Putting the cultural animal in perspective
Humans rely heavily on attitudes and beliefs; we use language and culture to navigate consistency, doubt, and social meaning.
Dual attitudes and the ability to doubt are uniquely human features that support science, philosophy, and culture.
Beliefs and believing (testable takeaways)
Automatic belief often accompanies understanding; deliberate doubt is a separate step.
Belief perseverance can be mitigated by presenting opposite theories and encouraging critical thinking.
Chapter 7 Summary (key points)
Attitudes: global evaluations; beliefs: informational assertions.
Automatic vs deliberate attitudes; dual attitudes may conflict.
Mere exposure, embodied attitudes, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and social learning shape attitudes.
Attitude polarisation: reflecting on attitudes can make them more extreme.
Consistency theories (notably cognitive dissonance) explain how people reduce inconsistency between thoughts and actions.
A-B problem: attitudes do not always predict behaviour; specificity, aggregation, accessibility, and conscious prominence improve predictions.
Behavioural intentions (theory of planned behaviour) link attitudes to behaviour via subjective norms and perceived behavioural control.
Selective exposure and filter bubbles: people tend to seek information that confirms their attitudes; media and algorithms can reinforce beliefs.
Coping and assumptive worlds: beliefs and coping strategies help people manage trauma and stress; religion often supports coping.
Irrational beliefs can undermine well-being but sometimes serve as coping mechanisms in the short term.
What makes us human: emotion, cognition, meaning, culture, and language enable complex social behavior and self-regulation.
Key terms (selected)
affect, affect-as-information hypothesis, affect balance, affective forecasting, arousal, automatic affect, brute vs deliberate processing, disgust, emodiversity, emotional intelligence, facial feedback hypothesis, helplessness, hedonic treadmill, life satisfaction, mood, optimism, resilience, risk-as-feelings hypothesis, shaming vs guilt, social learning, mere exposure effect, operant conditioning, precision in attitudes, cognitive dissonance, post-decision dissonance, selective exposure, theory of planned behaviour