Emotions

1. Emotions

2. Everybody smile!!!

3. What Is Emotion? • How do I know when you are experiencing an emotion? • Facial expression, flushed face, trembling, breathing rapidly, etc. • How do you know when you are experiencing emotion: • Increased heart rate, respirations, sweating, chills, trembling, etc.—ANS activity • It’s a subjective feeling.

4. What Is Emotion? • Obviously the result of ANS activity and involves the endocrine system (hormones are released). • Clearly an organized response (combines behaviour, ANS, and hormones) to deal with existing situations in the environment. • Emotional expression communicates important information between members of the species. • For humans it may have evolved from expression of basic postures between members of other species, e.g., threat, submission.

5. Two Major Questions • What is the relationship between our subjective experience and the underlying physiological state? • What role does the interpretation process play in the identification of emotion? • Three major theories, and their extensions try to answer these questions: • James-Lange Theory • Cannon-Bard Theory • Schachter-Singer Two-Factor Theory

6. James-Lange Theory • William James and Carl Lange almost independently arrived at this in 1884. James, who taught philosophy at Harvard is often considered the first psychologist. • Essentially said that the physiological experience IS the emotion.

7. I’m afraid because my heart is pounding. Snarling dog. Heart pounds. From http://bama.ua.edu/~jcollier/Intro-psych_Emotion.html Particular emotion felt is determined by the specific pattern of physiological change.

8. Problems for James-Lange • Those with spinal cord damage still experience and express emotion. • Many emotions have very similar bodily changes, e.g., fear and rage—faster heart rate, increased in blood sugar, dilated pupils, hair stands erect. • We are not very sensitive to changes in our internal organs, e.g., pupil dilation, blood sugar levels. • Changes in internal organs occur much more slowly than our experience of emotion. • Artificially inducing an aroused state does not lead to an emotional feeling, e.g., injections of adrenalin—feel “as if” anxious or angry.

9. Cannon-Bard Theory • In response to the criticisms of the James-Lange theory, James Cannon proposed this theory in 1929 and Phillip Bard soon revised it. • The emotion-arousing neural impulse travels to the thalamus. There it divides and simultaneously goes to the cortex to create the subjective emotional experience and to the hypothalamus where it creates the bodily changes. • The theory thus suggests that the bodily changes and the emotion occur together. • Cannon and Bard were incorrect in assuming that the thalamus was the centre of the emotions but their ideas started further exploration, leading to present day knowledge of the involvement of the limbic system in emotional expression

10. Heart pounds. Snarling dog. I’m afraid. Occur together From http://bama.ua.edu/~jcollier/Intro-psych_Emotion.html Particular emotion felt accompanies physiological change.

12. Schachter-Singer Two Factor Theory • Proposed in 1962 • Argued that emotional states tend to lead to more or less general arousal and that we interpret this arousal according to clues in the environment. • Both the physiological arousal and a cognitive label are necessary for a full experience of emotion. • If one is missing the subjective state will be incomplete.

13. Degree of fear determined by intensity of pounding. Heart pounds. Snarling dog. My heart is pounding because that dog is scary. I’m afraid From http://bama.ua.edu/~jcollier/Intro-psych_Emotion.html

14. Those who expected to be stimulated by the injection did not experience emotion. Those who were not informed of the effects of the injection did experience the appropriate emotion. Testing the Two Factor Theory

15. The arousal state can be misinterpreted—misattributionof arousal. Those who met the attractive investigator in a scary situation were more likely to call for a date. Further Evidence

16. How Do We Tell Emotions Apart? Russell and Barrett (1999) suggest that we rate the experience on two dimensions: Degree of activation and degree of pleasantness.

17. Lazarus Appraisal Theory • Richard Lazarus (1984) took the idea of cognitive appraisal a step further. • Suggested that biological and cultural factors were also important. • Culture affects how we perceive emotional stimuli, and provides ritualized behaviour. • Biologically we are predisposed to attend to certain stimuli, with variation in degree of response from individual to individual.

18. Lazarus Appraisal Theory • It is our biological makeup that causes us to respond to certain stimuli, our culture influences the way we react, and the cognitive system appraises the situation. • BIOLOGY, CULTURE, AND COGNITION interact to produce our emotional experience and response.

19. What Else Do We Know? • Feedback from the body does influence the emotional experience—perhaps James & Lange were not entirely wrong: • People with spinal cord injuries indicate emotions are dampened to some degree. • The higher the injury the less emotion the individual feels—reduced feedback=reduced emotional experience. • Zajonc (1984) argued that emotional responses can also be conditioned—we attach emotions to formerly neutral experiences.

20. Increase Your Understanding • Playing with facial features: http://www.dushkin.com/connectext/psy/ch10/facex.mhtml • Characterstics of emotional facial expressions: http://face-and-emotion.com/dataface/emotion/expression.jsp