Emotions: Expressed and Experienced

1. Emotions: Expressed and Experienced Which comes first the expression or the feeling? Do we know our own emotions?

2. LOL! Laughter • Is contagious • can provide relief from pain, alleviate stress and promote functioning of the immune system. • Can be used to promote solidarity among people -- as well as for exclusionary purposes.

3. Physiology and Feeling? • We often take it as a given that we experience an emotion and then our bodies react to reflect that feeling. • But it can be bi-directional. • Hold the pencil in your teeth or with your lips and read comic strips

4. James-Lange theory: • We feel sad because we cry, angry because our blood pressure rises, afraid because we tremble • The emotional experience is the consequence of a specific physiological reaction. • Support: Hold the pencil in your teeth or with your lips and read comic strips

5. Cannon-Bard Theory • Stimulus simultaneously triggers activity in the ANS and emotional experience. • Blush and feel embarrassed at the same time

6. 2 Factor Theory • Different emotions are merely different interpretations of a general pattern of bodily activity. • Your heart beats fast….so is it fear, anger, love, caffeine….

7. Love on a swinging bridge? • 1974 - Dutton and Aron • Experimental group = Young men crossing a long, narrow, suspension bridge that rocked & swayed 230 ft above a river. • Control group = Young men crossed a long, narrow, suspension bridge that rocked & swayed 230 ft above a river and “rested” for 10 minutes • Approached by an attractive female (researcher), asked to complete a survey and given her phone #. • Who called her more?

8. Love on a swinging bridge? • 13 out of 20 called in the experimental group, while only 7 out of 23 called from the control group. • Fear and attraction exchangeable? • Supports the 2 factor theory.

9. So which is correct? • Turns out that each theory has some support, but isn’t completely accurate. • We don’t just have general physiological response to emotion. -- certain combinations of physiological responses are related to certain emotions. • But we also aren’t perfectly sensitive to these combinations -- we misattribute our physiology. • The bodily reaction causes and is a consequence of the mentally feeling an emotion.

10. WOW! • Do we even know our own emotions? • Do we know other people’s emotions!?

11. demonstration • Try to accurately decode the motion being expressed here. • “I’m absolutely thrilled to be here” • “Gee thanks” • “Way to go dude” • “Real nice”

12. demonstration • Nervousness, surprise, disgust, anger, sadness, fear, and happiness have been found in studies to be the easiest emotions to detect. Whereas love, fear, desire, jealousy, pride, disappointment and relief are much more difficult to detect. • Gender differences? • What does this mean? • the role of empathy in understanding others’ emotional reactions.

13. http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/emotions-revealed • Are expressions universal? • The 6: anger, disgust, surprise, fear, happiness, sadness

14. Cultural Differences • While it seems universal to read the 6 major emotions; there are different expectations of how people will show them. • Awlad Ali Bedouins of Egypt’s western desert do not express feelings of loss or hurt in public; instead they show indifference or anger or assign blame. • Tahitian language lacks terms for sadness, longing and loneliness; instead they interpret these sensations as a type of sickness

15. Lie to Me • Our attempts to obey our culture’s display rules are sometimes betrayed by incomplete control of facial muscles 15

16. Deceptive Expression • Humans are generally not that good at detecting when others are lying • Studies look at accuracy based on profession (100% = perfect accuracy, 50% = guessing) 16

17. Deceptive Expression • Polygraph • measures physiological changes associated with stress • high false positive rate • Blood flow in brain • some brain areas are more active when people lie than when they tell the truth 17

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19. The Emotional Brain • Temporal lobe syndrome • Amygdala • appraisal • bilateral amygdala damage • no effect on recognition of happiness, sadness, & surprise • trouble recognizing anger, disgust, & fear • Nucleus accumbens 19

20. The Emotional Brain • Amygdala • make a rapid appraisal (pink route) • why? • Cortex • make a slow, thorough appraisal (green route) • why? 20

21. The Emotional Brain • Emotional regulation • typically to turn negative into positive • may sometimes need to “cheer down” • Reappraisal • thinking can change feeling • shown photo of woman crying at funeral amygdala became active • asked to reappraise and imagine woman is at wedding cortex became active and then amygdala deactivated 21

22. Emotional Communication • Emotional expression • emotional states influence the way we talk (intonation, inflection, loudness, & duration) • listeners can infer a speaker’s emotional state with better-than-chance accuracy • can also infer emotional states from how someone walks and facial expressions • Affective forecasting • not too good at predicting our emotional reactions to future events 22

23. Communicative Expression • Universality hypothesis • cross-cultural research supports this • congenitally blind persons make same expressions as others • The cause and effect of expression • feelings cause emotional expressions (muscles) • facial-feedback hypothesis • people with trouble experiencing emotions have trouble recognizing the emotions of others 23

24. Communicative Expression • Deceptive expression • Display rules • intensification • deintensification • masking • neutralizing 24

25. What Is Emotion? • Multidimensional scaling • Dimension of arousal • Dimension of valence (feeling) 25

26. Physiology of Emotion 26

27. Pg 208 in Blink • Subjects look at cartoons while holding a pen between their lips or teeth • Teeth found the cartoon much funnier • Ekman, Friesen and Levenson