Emotion Pt.1

Unit 4 Context: Mapping the Many Selves

• Final block of the course explores several “selves”
  • Emotional self (focus of this lecture)
  • Spiritual/religious self
  • Mental-health self
  • Life-satisfaction self
  • Constructing a desired future self
• Rationale: Each “self” offers a different lens on identity, well-being, and behaviour

Warm-Up Activity 1 — “Memory Hunting”

• Students asked to “hunt” for random, specific autobiographical events (≥ a week old if possible)
• Discuss details with peers while avoiding traumatic material
• Instructor then solicits only the emotion labels attached to those memories (fondness, joy, anxiety, shame, anger, etc.)

Take-aways from Activity

• Almost every “important” memory carries an emotional tag
• Memory accuracy is poor → we reconstruct past events, but what persists is their emotional salience
• Hippocampus (episodic storage) is anatomically/chemically linked to the amygdala (emotion processing) → emotion acts as a “remember-this!” tag

Emotions as a Pillar of Mind

• Referencing LeDoux’s Three-Part Mind model
  1. Cognition (memory, language, reasoning)
  2. Motivation (drives, goals)
  3. Emotion (feeling-based evaluations)
     3 pillars together constitute “mind”
• Thought experiment: Remove emotion → remaining being feels robotic, non-human; extreme depression sometimes mimics this “emotional numbness”

What Are Emotions? Two Discussion Prompts

1. "Define an emotion."
2. "List as many emotions as you can."

• Student lists contained mixed items: cognitive states (confusion), long-term attitudes (jealousy), short-term emotions (anger, joy), moral emotions (shame, guilt), etc.

Core Features Agreed Upon in Research

• Reaction to an internal/external event (APA: “complex reaction pattern involving experiential, behavioural, and physiological elements”)
• Short-lived (seconds–minutes)
• Physiological arousal is central (autonomic nervous system changes)
• Behavioural expression (facial/vocal/postural)
• Subjective experience (the “feeling” component)

Basic / Primary Emotions

• Most scholars converge on 6 \text{ to } 8 biologically-basic emotions
  • Fear
  • Anger
  • Joy (or Happiness in some lists)
  • Sadness
  • Disgust
  • Surprise
  • (Some add Acceptance & Anticipation)
• Pixar’s Inside Out mirrors the consensus set: fear, joy, anger, sadness, disgust
• Hallmarks
  • Universally recognisable facial expressions (Ekman research)
  • Rapid onset / rapid offset

Secondary & Complex Emotions

• Formed by combining basic emotions and/or adding cognitive appraisal (e.g.
  • Contempt = anger + disgust
  • Remorse = sadness + disgust
  • Jealousy = anger + fear + sadness)
• Plutchik’s Wheel shows 8 basics + 8 derivatives arranged by intensity

Emotions vs. Feelings

• Joy ≠ Happiness
  • Joy = transient emotion
  • Happiness = enduring feeling/state
• Asking “How are you feeling?” often elicits a feeling answer, not an emotion answer

Functional/Evolutionary Logic

• Emotions prepare the organism to act
  • Fear → fight/flight/freeze (3 F’s)
  • Disgust → rejection/avoidance (protects against toxins)
  • Joy → approach & social bonding
• Negative emotions are memory-privileged (easier recall) because they historically signalled threat
• Disgust is particularly potent as a retrieval cue (e.g., food poisoning example)

Physiological Signatures (Illustrative)

• Fear & Joy share increased heart rate and respiration, but differ in interpretation and facial musculature
• All basic emotions generate measurable autonomic changes: HR, skin conductance, hormone release (e.g., adrenaline)

Clinical Illustration: Major Depressive Episode

• Some sufferers report emotional blunting ("numb") rather than persistent sadness
• Demonstrates how loss of emotion disrupts felt “basic state of being”

The Two-Factor (Schachter & Singer) Theory of Emotion

1. Physiological arousal (implicit, limbic, non-conscious)
2. Cognitive appraisal/label (explicit, conscious)

• Emotion = Arousal + Label

Classic Adrenaline (Misattribution) Experiment

• All participants injected with adrenaline
  • Group A: Told accurately about effects ("your heart may race")
  • Group B: Told injection is inert (saline) → no arousal expectation
• Participants wait with a confederate displaying either euphoria or irritation
• Findings (revealed next class, but key logic):
  • When arousal was unexplained, subjects adopted the confederate’s emotional display (euphoria or anger)
  • When arousal was explained, subjects attributed changes to the drug, so emotional contagion diminished
• Demonstrates: we can misattribute bodily arousal to situational cues, altering the final emotional experience

Practical Connections & Implications

• Emotion regulation techniques often target either
  1. Reducing physiological arousal (breathing, relaxation)
  2. Re-labelling appraisal (cognitive re-framing)
• Marketing, political messaging, and film exploit rapid emotional triggers for persuasion
• Clinical disorders (anxiety, depression, anger disorders) involve either over-persistent emotions or blunted emotions, violating normal intensity/duration profiles

Ethical & Philosophical Notes

• Recognising that we lack full conscious control over emotional onset challenges strong notions of free will
• Memory–emotion linkage questions legal reliability of eyewitness accounts (emotionally-charged events feel vivid yet are reconstructive)
• Emotional manipulation studies (e.g., drug-induced arousal) raise consent & deception issues in research ethics

Study Tips & Integration

• Link basic emotion list to anatomical circuits (amygdala ↔ hypothalamus ↔ prefrontal cortex)
• Practice identifying whether a state you recall is feeling or emotion using duration/intensity criteria
• Use real-life “fight-flight-freeze” reflections (car cuts you off, pop quiz announced) to cement physiological signatures
• Watch Inside Out as a mnemonic for basic emotions
• Anticipate exam questions on
  • Distinguishing emotion vs (trait) affect vs mood
  • Applying two-factor theory to everyday scenarios
  • Describing how emotion enhances or skews memory encoding and retrieval