Agenda: 20 January

1. Agenda: 20 January • Administrative Issues • Enrollment • Research Participation Pool Handout • Update on coursepack & next week’s readings • In-class experiment • Today’s topic: Three Enduring Questions

2. Three Enduring Questions • What is an emotion? • What causes an emotion? • Why do we have emotions?

3. I. What is an Emotion? • Basic Definitions: Physiological & Functional • Physiological: James (1884) • Emotion is the feeling of bodily sensations (peripheral account, rather than central) • Some support: facial feedback, etc. • However, correlations between cognitive, physiological, and behavioral systems is low.

4. I. What is an Emotion (cont.)? • Basic Definitions: Physiological & Functional • Functional Definitions: • Frijda – Defined by changes in Four Systems • Subjective feeling • Appraisal • Action readiness • Physiological response • Campos – Processes that “establish, maintain, change, or terminate the relation between the person and the environment on matters of significance to the person.”

5. I. What is an Emotion (cont.)? • Affect subsumes mood, emotion, temperament, preference, evaluation, etc. • Features that Distinguish Emotion from Mood • Time course (see p. 124 in Oatley) • Subjective salience • Facial expression/signature • Specificity of eliciting event (target)

6. II. What Causes an Emotion? • Three Different Approaches • Appraisal Theories (Smith & Ellsworth, etc.) • Recognition of a significant event, followed by an evaluation of its consequences along specific dimensions • Primary & Secondary Appraisal (Lazarus) • Primary: Goal relevance? Goal congruence? Ego involvement? • Secondary: How will I cope with it?

7. II. What Causes an Emotion (cont.)? • Appraisal Theories, cont. • Dimensions of evaluation • Pleasantness • Anticipated effort • Attentional Activity • Certainty • Agency (human, environment) • Control (self, other)

8. II. What Causes an Emotion (cont.)? • Three Different Approaches (cont.) 2. Defining Characteristics (Frijda) • Real transgressions of concerns produce emotion • Changes in conditions lead to emotion

9. II. What Causes an Emotion (cont.)? • Three Different Approaches (cont.) • Neuroscience (Panksepp) • A system of circuits that respond unconditionally to stimuli arising from major life-challenging circumstances; they activate or inhibit motor subroutines as well as autonomic and hormonal changes.

10. Multi-modal response tendencies Antecedent conditions Subjective experience Facial program Inter-personal Vocalization program Emotionprototype Motor program Intra-personal Physiologic support Cognition Appraisal

11. III. Why do we Have Emotions? • One answer: Evolutionarily Adaptive • Emotions as adaptations that solve problems • Ekman: “primary function of emotion is to mobilize the organism to deal quickly with important interpersonal encounters.” • Another function is to signal action, hence fairly universal muscle patterns in face • Emotions as “cognitive interrupts” • (Simon) Emotions set processing priorities

12. III. Why do we Have Emotions (cont.)? • A second answer: Social Constructed • Lutz and Averill: Cultures socialize emotion to maintain social order • Norms about permissible feelings • Marxist: those in power have control over feeling rules

13. III. Why do we have emotions (continued)? • Comparison between two approaches: Why variation across cultures? • Evolutionary: Cultural display rules modify already occurring emotion. • Constructed: Display rules constitute emotional experience