Emotions
Name as many emotions as you can:
Excitement
Anger
Fear
Happiness
Surprise
Disgust
Shame
Sadness
Contempt
Guilt
What are emotions?
The interplay of physiological arousal, expressive behavior and conscious experience.
Physiology of Emotion
Emotions caused an aroused physiological state: automatic/sympathetic nervous system.
Glucose released
Respiration increased
Blood clotter released
Adrenaline: epinephrine, norepinephrine
Blood pressure up.
Stress
Creates the aroused physiological state for an extended period of time, reeking havoc
on the immune system and other brain/body systems, leading to anxiety and/or
depression.
Arousal and Performance
Arousal theory states that there with easy and well-learned tasks, arousal enhances
performance. With difficult or unrehearsed tasks arousal hurts performance.
Arousal and emotion
It is very difficult to tell the difference between aroused emotional states: anger, fear,
lust: although the behavioral look of each is distinct. This implies a cognitive
component.
Emotion and the Brain
Different emotions flow through different brain circuits.
Disgust and sadness tens to trigger right brain circuits.
Happiness and other positive emotions tend to be left frontal lobe activities.
Expressing Emotion
Feeling emotion and expressing emotions are two very different things.
Much of communication is nonverbal: body, face and gestures. Staring into eyes can
give good “love” information.
People are very good at reading nonverbal cues. You can tell a happy face from 100 yds.
Angry faces tend to leap out of the crowd at you.
Blind children use the same facial expressions as sighted: genetic…all cultures the
same.
Reading Emotions
Introverts are better at reading nonverbal cues, extraverts are better at expressing them.
Females are better at reading and expressing them.
Expressiveness and Culture
Cultures vary in the emotions that they express and the intensity in which they express
it. However, facial expressions for various expressions are universal.
For instance, Japanese rarely show self-aggrandizing and negative emotions, but likely
to show happiness, as means of social glue.
Expressiveness
Expressions not only communicate emotion by the regulate it.
Smiling will make you happier, Cartoons are funnier when smiling.
Walking boldly will make you more confident.
Pull up on your desk, push down on it, which feels better?
Expressing emotion
Women are better at reading emotion and are more likely to “feel” the emotion of the
other person: empathy.
Imitating others facial expressions aids in empathy.
Experiencing emotion
Emotions can be categorized in three different ways:
Pleasant vs. unpleasant
Intense vs. sleepy
Long-lasting vs. brief: which lasts longer?
Sadness lasts longer than grief/anger.
Concealing emotions
Humans are also good at intentionally concealing emotions. Studies show that only
those highly trained for looking for deceit are good at it, even law enforcement officers
rarely do better than random guessing. However, without intentional deception, even the
very young can read emotions with great accuracy.
Fear
Controlled by the amygdala located at the ends of the hippocampus in the Limbic
system of the lower brain.
Fear is adaptive to fight/flee from dangerous events. We can learn to fear just about
anything, but we fear some things easier than others: heights, spiders, snakes.
Fear
Humans can learn to fear embarrassment and social situations which can become
maladaptive when extreme.
Chronic anxiety (fear) of social events can have devastating effects on your immune
system and other mood systems (depression/anxiety disorders).
Extreme fear of a specific trigger is called a phobia.
Thresholds of Fear
Peoples’ triggers for fear vary. Some are not easily fearful: test pilots, serial killers, type
B personalities; while some are anxious/nervous almost all the time. Tranquilizers
operate on this brain/body system.
Happiness
One’s mood colors everything else: memories, assessments of relationships, relative
well-being (ratio of positive thoughts versus negative or as a sense of life satisfaction),
thoughts of the future.
Feel Good, Do Good Phenomena: one of the most consistent findings in Psych: The
happier you are the more likely you are to help others.
Happiness
People have a happiness set point (50% heritable). In general happiness hovers in a
range around that point independent of life circumstances. If something extremely bad
happens or extremely good , you eventually rebound back to your range.
Two years later, the relative happiness of accident paraplegics and lottery winners is the
same.
Money and Happiness
Money does not buy happiness. There is no relationship between money and happiness,
with the exception of the desperately poor in impoverished countries.
Money only buys a temporary surge of happiness.
Adaptation-level Principle
Is the tendency to judge various stimuli relative to our previous experiences. If
circumstances change, within months you recalibrate your level and then emotionally
judge experiences relative to the new circumstance.
Adaptation-level Principle
So, for material wealth to increase relative-well being would require and ever increasing
abundance.
Think about the Amish, never had, never missed.
Relative Deprivation Principle
Not only is happiness relative to our own previous experiences, but we compare
ourselves to others just above and just below us.
So, if everyone gets an A we’re not as happy as if we got the only A. If you’re GPA is
3.0, you’ll be happier comparing yourself to 2.0s than 4.0s. But basically someone is
always above and always below.
Get Happiness!!!!(within your inherited range)
Most derived enjoyment from becoming engrossed in interesting meaningful work and
play (the less expensive, the better): Get flow.
Form close meaningful relationships with others.
People who feel an internal-locus of control report being happier.
Have faith in something larger than themselves.
Opponent Process Theory of Emotion
When you feel one emotion (fear of public speaking), you will feel the opposite feeling
when resolved (feeling elated afterward). But when the first emotion is repeated, it is less
intense and the opponent feeling becomes stronger. (So next less afraid of public
speaking, but the elation is stronger when done.)
Opponent Process Theory of Emotion
Examples: Do drugs, feel good, come down, get depressed. Do more drugs, not as high,
come down harder.
Exercise hard, causes pain, stop exercise feel sense of well-being, exercise again, little
easier, stop well-being is even better.
Moral: Do painful/difficult/disciplined stuff (studying) as primary emotion, because the
reward is more pleasurable.
Anger
Most people report becoming at least mildly angry several times a week.
Generally triggers are perceived misdeeds of friends and loved ones.
Particularly anger-provoking with the deeds are thought to be willful, unjustified and
avoidable.
Anger
Anger is adaptive for arousing protective reactions, but maladaptive when it fuels
behaviors we later regret.
Anger and Catharsis
Displaying anger is not cathartic (cleansing), it increases anger.
The immediate soothing effect it causes becomes positively reinforcing, building anger
as habitual response.
Dealing with Anger
Calm down first!!! Remember the fuel of emotion is physical arousal, so when you
come back to homeostasis, you’ll be more rational.
Deal with issues, quickly and directly (after calming down), so as not to rehearse the
anger-provoking incident.
Aerobic exercise elevates mood, and burns epinephrine and cortisol.
James-Lange Theory
Says that emotions are experienced after physiological arousal occurs and the brain
reads the subtle difference in the response. In J-L emotions are read from arousal, no
cognition necessary.
Cannon-Bard Theory
Disagreed with James-Lange, says that emotions occur simultaneously in the brain and
body. The brain routes the sensory message to both at the same time.
Cannon Bard’s theory explains how the same physiological arousal can cause different
emotions.
Schacter’s Two Factor theory
Combines the other two.
Says that the physical arousal is the fuel that intensifies the emotion.
However after arousal occurs, the brain then puts a label on through cognition, deciding
what the emotions should be.
Epinephrine experiment with college students. Their experience of emotion depended
on what they believed.
Exp: one subject is injected with epiniphrine and put in room with an irritated or happy
person. The person reads the physiological response as being irritation or happiness,
showing that the emotion felt is dependent on cognition, not physiological response.
Can emotions be created without cognition? Yes, probably routed directly to amygdala
from Thalamus, that explains why those never bitten by snake, still can be afraid of
them…biological disposed.
Complex ones need cognition.