Emotions: Expressed and
Experienced
Which comes first the expression or the
feeling?
Do we know our own emotions?
LOL!
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decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Laughter
Quic kT ime™ and a
dec ompress or
are needed to s ee this pi cture.
• 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.
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
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
QuickTime™ and a
decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Cannon-Bard Theory
• Stimulus simultaneously triggers activity
in the ANS and emotional experience.
– Blush and feel embarrassed at the same
time
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….
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?
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.
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.
WOW!
Do we even know our own
emotions?
 Do we know other people’s
emotions!?
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”
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.
http://www.kqed.org/quest/tele
vision/emotions-revealed
– Are expressions universal?
• The 6: anger, disgust, surprise, fear, happiness,
sadness
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
Lie to Me
• Our attempts to obey our culture’s display rules are
sometimes betrayed by incomplete control of facial
muscles
15
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
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
stop
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
The Emotional Brain
• Amygdala
– make a rapid appraisal
(pink route)
– why?
• Cortex
– make a slow, thorough
appraisal (green route)
– why?
20
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
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
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
Communicative Expression
• Deceptive expression
• Display rules
–intensification
–deintensification
–masking
–neutralizing
24
What Is Emotion?
• Multidimensional
scaling
• Dimension of arousal
• Dimension of valence
(feeling)
25
Physiology of Emotion
26
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