Elements of Emotional Experience

Emotion

Intertwining of Motivation and Emotion

• Motivation and emotion are closely related; emotion can be a cause of motivation, and motivation can be a cause of emotion (Sands, Ngo, & Isaacowitz, 2016).

  • Emotion causing motivation:

    • Example: Anger about a work schedule motivates a job search.

    • Example: Jealousy motivates asking out an ex-girlfriend's friend.

  • Motivation causing emotion:

    • Example: Motivation to win a contest leads to anxiety during judging and elation or gloom based on the outcome.

• Despite their close relationship, motivation and emotion are distinct.

Determinants of Achievement Behaviour

• John Atkinson's theory suggests that a person's pursuit of achievement depends on:

  • Need for achievement.

  • Perceived probability of success.

  • Incentive value of success.

• Examples illustrating these determinants:

  1. Thoko awaiting the 200-meter dash finals demonstrates need for achievement.

  2. Rendani considering an easy class demonstrates perceived probability of success.

  3. Diana consistently working hard for top marks demonstrates need for achievement.

Elements of Emotional Experience

• Emotions are central to profound and everyday experiences.

  • Examples include joy at weddings, grief at funerals, ecstasy in love, anger at rudeness, dismay at car repairs, and happiness at exam success.

• Shaked and Clore (2017) emphasize the central role of emotions in storytelling.

• Emotion comprises cognitive, physiological, and behavioural components.

  • (1) Cognitive Component: Subjective conscious experience.

  • (2) Physiological Component: Bodily arousal.

  • (3) Behavioural Component: Characteristic overt expressions.

The Cognitive Component

• Psychologists rely on subjective verbal reports to study the cognitive component of emotions.

• Emotions are potentially intense internal feelings.

• Joseph LeDoux (1996) states that emotions happen to us, rather than being willed.

• Cognitive appraisals of events determine emotional experiences.

  • Example: Giving a speech may be threatening for one person but routine for another.

• Conscious experience of emotion includes an evaluative aspect (pleasant or unpleasant).

  • Evaluative reactions can be automatic and subconscious.

• Individuals often experience mixed emotions.

  • Example: An executive receiving a promotion may feel both happiness and anxiety.

• People are generally poor at anticipating their emotional responses to future events.

• Affective forecasting involves predicting emotional reactions to future events.

  • People can predict whether events will be positive or negative but misjudge the intensity and duration of emotional reactions.

  • Example: Students mispredict happiness levels based on housing assignments.

• Impact bias leads to overestimating the emotional impact of future events.

• The direction of affective forecasting errors depends on situational considerations.

The Physiological Component

• Emotional processes are closely tied to physiological processes.

• The biological bases of emotions are diffuse and multifaceted.

  • Involving the brain, autonomic nervous system, and endocrine system.

• Autonomic arousal:

  • Example: Fear when a car spins out of control leads to increased heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, pupil dilation, goosebumps, and perspiration.

  • Emotions are accompanied by physical arousal (Larsen et al., 2008).

• Much of the physiological arousal associated with emotion occurs through the autonomic nervous system (Mendes, 2016).

  • The autonomic nervous system regulates the activity of glands, smooth muscles, and blood vessels.

  • Responsible for the fight-or-flight response, controlled by adrenal hormones.

• Hormonal changes play a crucial role in emotional responses to stress.

• The connection between emotion and autonomic arousal provides the basis for the polygraph, or lie detector.

  • Invented in 1915 by William Marston.

  • Monitors indicators of autonomic arousal, including heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and galvanic skin response (GSR).

  • GSR is an increase in the electrical conductivity of the skin when sweat glands increase activity.

• Polygraph measures autonomic fluctuations while a subject is questioned.

  • Examiner asks nonthreatening questions to establish a baseline, then observes changes during critical questions.

• The polygraph has been controversial since its invention (Grubin & Madsen, 2005).

  • Advocates claim high accuracy (85%-90%), but evidence does not support this (Iacono, 2008; Iacono & Ben-Shakhar, 2019; Miejer & Verschuere, 2015).

  • Truthful individuals may experience emotional arousal, and some can lie without autonomic arousal.

  • Polygraph results are not reliable enough for legal proceedings (Synnott, Dietzel, & Ioannou, 2015).

Neural Circuits

• Autonomic responses accompanying emotions are controlled in the brain.

• The hypothalamus, amygdala, and limbic system are viewed as the seat of emotions.

• The amygdala plays a central role in acquiring conditioned fears.

• Sensory inputs capable of causing emotions arrive in the thalamus.

  • Information is routed along two pathways: to the amygdala and to the cortex.

• The amygdala processes information quickly and triggers activity in the hypothalamus if it detects a threat.

  • This leads to autonomic arousal and hormonal responses.

  • This rapid-response pathway evolved as a highly adaptive warning system.

• Some theorists believe that specific emotions are not tied to activity in distinct brain areas.

  • Emotions depend on flexible patterns of activity in neural networks distributed across many brain regions.

The Behavioural Component

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

• Emotions are expressed in body language or nonverbal behaviour.

• Facial expressions can reveal basic emotions.

• Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen found that subjects generally identify six fundamental emotions based on facial cues: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust.

Facial Feedback Hypothesis

• Muscular feedback from facial expressions contributes to the conscious experience of emotions .

• Facial muscles send signals to the brain, helping it recognize the experienced emotion.

• Smiles, frowns, and lined brows help create the experience of emotions.

• Studies show that mimicking facial expressions associated with emotions leads to experiencing those emotions.

• Botox injections in the forehead to paralyse frowning muscles are used as a novel treatment for depression (Wollmer et al., 2012, 2014).

Innate Nature of Facial Expressions

• Facial expressions may be largely innate (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1975; Izard, 1994).

• People blind since birth smile and frown much like everyone else (Galati, Scherer, & Ricci-Bitti, 1997).

• Facial expressions of sighted and blind athletes are indistinguishable (Matsumoto & Willingham, 2009).

• Facial expressions that go with emotions are wired into the human brain (Matsumoto & Hwang, 2011).

Culture and the Elements of Emotion

• Are emotions innate and universal, or socially learned and culturally variable?

• Research has found both similarities and differences among cultures in the experience of emotion.

Cross-Cultural Similarities in Emotional Experience

• Ekman and Friesen (1975) found considerable cross-cultural agreement in identifying happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust based on facial expressions.

• The Fore people of New Guinea could identify emotions in photos, suggesting facial expressions of basic emotions are universally recognised.

• Doubts have been raised about this conclusion.

• More recent research examining spontaneous labelling of emotions found weaker support for the universality hypothesis.

• Cross-cultural similarities have also been found in the cognitive appraisals that lead to certain emotions.

• Little cultural variance exists in the physiological arousal accompanying emotional experience.

• Some theorists question the assertion that facial expressions of emotion are universal.

• Variations exist across cultures in subjects' accuracy in identifying specific emotions.

Cross-Cultural Differences in Emotional Experience

• Cultural disparities exist in how people think about and express their emotions.

• Variations have been observed in how cultures categorise emotions.

• Some basic categories of emotion understood in Western cultures are unrecognised in some non-Western cultures.

  • Many non-Western groups lack a word for depression.

• Critics note that a lack of words for emotional concepts does not necessarily mean those emotions are not recognised.

• Cultural disparities also exist in nonverbal expressions of emotion.

• Display rules are norms that regulate the appropriate expression of emotions.

  • These norms vary from one culture to another.

  • The Ifaluk people of Micronesia restrict expressions of happiness.

  • Japanese culture emphasises the suppression of negative emotions in public.

• Nonverbal expressions of emotions vary somewhat across cultures.