Emotions
Everybody smile!!!
What Is Emotion?
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How do I know when you are experiencing an
emotion?
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Facial expression, flushed face, trembling, breathing
rapidly, etc.
How do you know when you are experiencing
emotion:
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Increased heart rate, respirations, sweating, chills,
trembling, etc.—ANS activity
It’s a subjective feeling.
What Is Emotion?
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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.
Two Major Questions
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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:
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James-Lange Theory
Cannon-Bard Theory
Schachter-Singer Two-Factor Theory
James-Lange Theory
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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.
Snarling
dog.
Heart
pounds.
I’m afraid because
my heart is
pounding.
From http://bama.ua.edu/~jcollier/Intro-psych_Emotion.html
Particular emotion felt is determined by the specific
pattern of physiological change.
Problems for James-Lange
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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.
Cannon-Bard Theory
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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
Snarling
dog.
Heart pounds.
I’m afraid.
Occur
together
From http://bama.ua.edu/~jcollier/Intro-psych_Emotion.html
Particular emotion felt accompanies physiological change.
Schachter-Singer
Two Factor Theory
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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.
Heart pounds.
Snarling
dog.
My heart is
pounding
because that
dog is scary.
Degree of fear
determined by
intensity of
pounding.
I’m
afraid
From http://bama.ua.edu/~jcollier/Intro-psych_Emotion.html
Testing the Two Factor Theory
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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.
Further Evidence
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The arousal state
can be
misinterpreted—
misattribution
of arousal.
Those who met
the attractive
investigator in a
scary situation
were more likely
to call for a date.
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.
Lazarus Appraisal Theory
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Richard Lazarus (1984) took the idea of
cognitive appraisal a step further.
Suggested that biological and cultural
factors were also important.
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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.
Lazarus Appraisal Theory
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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.
What Else Do We Know?
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Feedback from the body does influence the
emotional experience—perhaps James & Lange
were not entirely wrong:
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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.
Increase Your Understanding
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Playing with facial features:
http://www.dushkin.com/connectext/psy/c
h10/facex.mhtml
Characterstics of emotional facial
expressions: http://face-andemotion.com/dataface/emotion/expression
.jsp