Chapter 10
[Emotions and Health]
Case: Elliot had part of prefrontal cortex removed
 quick recovery
 change in personality
 good memory and intelligence
 detached from problems
o few emotional responses
emotions are fundamental part of life
emotion (affect): refers to feelings that involve subjective evaluation,
physiological processes, and cognitive beliefs
 immediate responses to environmental events
o road rage, etc.
moods: diffuse and long-lasting emotional states that influence rather than
interrupt thought and behavior
stress: a pattern of behavior or behavioral and psychological responses to
events that match or exceed an organism’s abilities
health psychology: field of psychological sciences concerned with the
events that affect physical well-being
HOW ARE EMOTIONS ADAPTIVE?
 Mind helps solve problems, shown via research on emotions
 Negative and positive experiences guide behavior that increases
chances of survival and reproduction
 Allows us to interact with humans intelligently read facial features
Facial Expressions Communicate Emotion
 Emotional expression are powerful nonverbal communications
 At birth, infants capable of showing joy, interest, disgust, and pain
o Later: anger and sadness
o Even later: fear
 Eyes important: presented with pictures of eyes, could guess
emotion fairly accurately without looking at mouth
 However, mouth more important
Facial expressions Across Cultures
 Darwin: face innately communicates emotion to others, regardless
of culture
 People tested in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Japan, etc. and could
identify the same facial expressions
Display Rules and Gender
 Display rules: govern how and when emotions are exhibited
o Gender differences: women can show more emotion,
articulate emotion, etc.
Emotions Serve Cognitive Functions
 Even though we seem to be thinking rationally, our affective system
affects our decisions
 Affective responses arise quickly and automatically, affecting
everything we see and do
 People’s moods can alter ongoing mental processes
o Good moods=use of heuristic thinking
 Recent theory: proposes that increased dopamine levels mediate
the effects of positive affect on cognitive tasks
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Positive affect leads to higher dopamine production, crucial for
advantageous cognitive effects of positive effect
Decision Making
 Anticipated emotional states are important sources of info that
guide decision making
 If complex situation, emotions are heuristic guides
o Provide feedback for quick decision
 Decision have direct affect on cognitive choices
o Cancellation of a flight after accident even if aware of
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likelihood of an accident is low
When making risk judgments, emotions have more impact than
cognitive processes
Affect-as-information theory: posits that people use current
emotional state to make judgments and appraisals
o Even if not knowing reason for current mood
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Example: Phone questionnaire regarding quality/happiness with
current living situation. If made aware of bad/good weather then it
no longer affects their responses, in ref. to their life
Somatic Markers
 Antonio Damasio (Descartes’ Error)
o Somatic marker theory: posits that most self-regulatory
actions and decisions are affected by the bodily actions
(somatic markers) that arise form contemplating outcomes
 Somatic markers: bodily reactions that arise from the
emotional evaluation of an action’s consequences
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Contemplation of action=emotional reaction, based on expectation
of action’s outcome (determined by past history of performing
action)
o EX: speeding and realization that it has lead to tickets,
therefore you slow down
People with damage to frontal lobes, do not use past outcomes to
regulate behavior
o Elliot  bad decisions
Adaptiveness: emotional reactions help select responses that likely
promote survival and reproduction
Emotions Capture Attention
 People are especially sensitive to emotional information
 Research using emotional stroop task shows that cognitive
processes biased towards emotional words
o Harder to overcome words like “anger” unlike neutral words
like “pencil”
 Temporary blink: occurs because attention was focused on the first
word, temporary impairment in processing subsequent words
Emotions Aid Memory
 Improved memory for emotion-producing event or stimuli
 Tested using remember/know procedure
o Participants asked about recognition of items from past
experiments
o If item familiar then they know it
o If item accompanied by sensory, semantic, or emotional detail
then remember
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o Highly negative pictures more likely to be remembered
Stress or drugs that induce arousal lead to stronger memories
o Norepinephrine
Beta blockers (block Norepinephrine) impair memory for emotional
words (neutral ones unaffected)/recognition of emotional words
Suggests that these blockers might help prevent posttraumatic
stress disorder (PTSD)
o Given to some subjects within 6 hours of traumatic event
o Within month, fewer symptoms of PTSD then placebo group
Emotions Strengthen Interpersonal Skills
 Little attention paid to interpersonal skills since associated with
Freudian thinking
 However, now theories look into their role in survival and evolution
 Rejection of individuals due to danger of draining resources or
threatening group stability
 New view looks at interpersonal skills as evolved mechanisms to
facilitate interpersonal interactions
o Helping to appease/repairing transgressions
Guilt Strengthens Social Bonds
 Guilt: negative emotional state associated with anxiety, tension,
and agitation
 Experience of guilt and it’s maintenance (initiation, maintenance,
avoidance) makes little sense beyond interpersonal interaction
context
 Prototypical guilt experience due to feeling of responsibility for
other person’s negative affective state
 Guilt can be experienced without feeling of personal responsibility
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Guilt
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Guilt
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Guilt
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Survivor’s guilt
benefits strong relations by influencing behavior
Prevents cheating
Phoning home on Sundays
serves to show importance of relationships
Affirms social bonds
can serve as influence tactic
Manipulates behavior of others
Socialization Is Crucial for Interpersonal Skills
 Socialization more importance than biology for children’s experience
of guilt
 Longitudinal studies look at monozygotic and dizygotic twins at 14,
20 , and 24 months
o Study finds that most negative emotions considerably
influenced by genetics
o Guilt was highly influenced by social environment
o Environmental influence strengthened over time, while
genetic influence is diminished
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Increased warmth of parents is associated with greater guilt in
children
o Feelings of guilt develop in healthy and happy relationships
 Children  Citizens: Develop feelings of guilt as they learn to
empathize
o Experience guilt when transgressing against others
Embarrassment and Blushing
 Embarrassment: naturally occurring state occurring after violations
of cultural norms, loss of physical poise, teasing, and self-image
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Jealousy
threats
Rectifies interpersonal awkwardness and restores social bonds after
transgression
o Represents submission to and affiliation with social group
o Recognition of unintentional social error
Research: those showing embarrassment elicit more sympathy,
forgiveness, amusement, and laughter
o Reaffirms close relationships after transgression
Blushing: research suggests that it occurs in response to belief that
others view them negatively, thereby communicating realization of
interpersonal errors
Serves as nonverbal apology in order to repair and maintain
relationships
o Mark Twain: “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs
to.”
o Darwin: “Most peculiar and most human of all expressions.”
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David Buss (The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealously Is as Necessary
as Love and Sex) contends that jealousy is an indispensable
component of long-term relationships by sparking passion and
commitment
He also holds that displays of jealousy communicate commitment to
relationship to sexual rivals
Research supports this
o People in relationship often purposely provoke jealousy as
test of commitment
He also believes that jealousy revives sexual passion in the
threatened partner
HOW DO PEOPLE EXPERIENCE EMOTIONS?
 Emotions are difficult to describe  Defy language
 3 components to emotion:
o subjective experience
o physical change
o cognitive appraisal
 Subjective experience is the feeling state such as the answer you
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give when asked “How are you feeling?”
o Sad, happy, depressed
Physical change are those changes such as increased heart rate,
skin temperature, brain activity, etc
Cognitive appraisal is the understanding and belief to of why the
feeling is being experienced
Emotions Have a Subjective Component
 Emotions are phenomenogical: experience them subjectively
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Know when experiencing emotion because it is felt
Varies widely: some experience distinct emotions daily while others
infrequently or only minor emotional reactions
People over or under-emotional tend to have psychological
problems
o Mood disorders
Alexithymia: disorder involving a lack of subjective experience of
emotions
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Physiological messages associated with emotions do not reach brain
centers for interpretation
 Damage to brain regions—prefrontal cortex—is associated with loss
of subjective component to emotion
Distinguishing Among Types of Emotions
 Emotion theorist distinguish between primary and secondary
emotions
o Primary emotions: evolutionarily adaptive, shared across
cultures, and associated with specific biological and physical
states
Anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness (surprise,
contempt)
o Secondary emotions: blends of primary emotions
 Remorse, guilt, submission, anticipation
o Circumplex model of understanding emotions: emotions are
arranged in a circle around the intersection of two core
dimensions of affect
o James Russell and Lisa Feldman Barrett developed model
which utilized valence (degree of pleasantness or
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unpleasantess) and activation (level or arousal)
 Excited: affective state including pleasure and arousal
 Depressed: affective state including low arousal and
negative effect
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Note: I got this picture online so there are differences in terminology to the picture
in our book (p. 394). Overall, it’s the same concept.
*Aroused=Activated
*Not Aroused=Deactived
*line connecting “Pleasant” and “Unpleasant” is referred to as “valence”
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Scientists make distinction between positive activation and negative
activation
Hold that both can be experienced simultaneously
o Bittersweet feeling when reminiscing about a good friend or
family member who passed away
Positive activation states associated with increased dopamine
Negative activation states associated with increase in
norepinephrine
o Supports notion that both are independent
Watson and colleagues argue that distinctions between positive and
negative activation are adaptive
Link affect of motivational states of approach and avoidance
o seek out food, sex, and companionship for pleasure
o avoid dangerous animals to avoid pain
Emotions Have a Physiological Component
 Emotions associated with physical change
o Which causes which?
 James-Lange theory of emotion: suggest that the experience of
emotional is elicited by a physiological response to a particular
stimulus or situation
o “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike,
afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or
tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful.”
 Molding of facial muscles to mimic emotional state activation of
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associated emotion
Facial feedback hypothesis: idea that facial expression trigger the
experience of emotion
James Laird tested this by having people hold pencil in their mouth
either with teeth (“smiling”) or between their lip and upper nose
(“serious”).
o People holding the pencil in their mouth found cartoons to be
funniest
Studies on actors show that the physiological responses of those
actors are were different for portrayals of different emotions
These findings lend some support to the James-Lange theory
However, Walter Cannon, observed that while the mind is quick to
experience emotions, the body is much slower
Also, various emotions cause same visceral responses
Cannon-Bard theory of emotion: asserts that emotion-producing
stimuli from the environment elicit both n emotional and physical
reaction
o Mind and body operate independently in experiencing
emotions
Emotions Have a Cognitive Component
 Stanley Schachter hypothesized that emotions were interactions of
physiological arousal and cognitive appraisal
 Two-factor theory of emotion: Proposes that a situation evokes
both a physiological response, such as arousal, and a cognitive
interpretation, or emotion label
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People try to find the source for their emotional state but
sometimes reach incorrect conclusions
Schachter and Jerome Singer develop experiment to test it:
o People given a stimulant or a placebo. The stimulant was
adrenaline which produces increased heart rate, sweaty
palms, and shakes. some of the participants was told that
they were given a stimulant while others were told nothing.
o In the euphoric state, subjects left with a confederate who
played with a hula hoop, made paper airplanes.
o In the angry state, subjects were asked very personal
questions by a confederate
o Those told about the adrenaline would know that their
physical arousal was due to the stimulant while those who
didn’t know, would not
o Uninformed participants reported being happy with the
euphoric confederate but less happy with the angry
confederate
People Can Misattribute the Source of Emotional States
 Misattribution of arousal: when emotion label is derived from the
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wrong source
Research done to see if people could fall in love due to
misattribution of arousal
o Male participant asked to meet interviewer at other end of a
narrow suspension bridge or at the other end of stone bridge
o Attractive female researcher met the subject half-way on the
bridge
o Men who interviewed on the scary suspension bridge were
more likely to called the interviewer for a date
o Excitation transfer: form of misattribution in which residual
physiological arousal cased by one event is transferred to a
new stimulus.
o After exercise, there is an interim period where the arousal
from the exercise can be misattributed to something else
o Dating: going to a scary or action movie might lead to
excitation transfer and raise odds of a second date!
People Regulate Their Moods
 Must harness our emotional responses on a daily basis
o Too anxious to study or angry when being cut off
o Successfully regulation emotional states depends on several
strategies:
 Try to put ourselves in certain situation and avoid
others:
 Better off in a quiet location to propose
 Focus attention on certain aspect of the situation
 Focusing on a restless toddler next to you on the
plane if afraid of flying
 Remembering that thing aren’t real in scary
movies
o Studies show that people engaging in reappraisal changes the
activity of brain regions involved in the experience of emotion
o Framing of event—“cognitive framing of it”—contributes to
intensity of emotional response as well as the labeling
 Storm blowing roof off=sad
 Not fixing roof and it blowing off as result=angry/guilty
Humor
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Simple and effective method of regulating negative emotions with
mental and physical benefits
Smiling and laughing allows a state of pleasurable, relaxed
excitation
Laughter stimulates endocrine secretion; improved immune
system; release of hormones, catecholamines, and endorphins
Reduces perception of pain
Laughing at inappropriate times: allows people to distance
themselves from negative emotions and strengthens connections to
others
o Interviewed 40 people with recently deceased spouse:
 Genuine laughter during interview associated with
positive mental health and fewer negative feelings
Suppression and Rumination
 Two common mistakes when regulating mood: thought suppression
and rumination
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WHAT
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Thought suppression: attempt not to respond or feel the emotion at
all
Suppressing thoughts is extremely difficult and often leads to
rebound effect
Rebound effect: people think more about something after
suppression than before
Try not to think of a white bear  think of a white bear more often
Rumination: thinking about, elaborating, and focusing on undesired
thoughts or feelings, which prolongs, rather than alleviates, a
negative mood
Impedes successful mood-regulating strategies such as problem
solving or distraction
Distraction is the best way to avoid these two mistakes since you
temporarily stop thinking about problem
Can backfire: watching movie with same troubling situation as your
problem leads to wallowing and mental anguish
IS THE NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS OF EMOTION?
Many levels of analysis to study emotion  will focus on biology
Body plays important role
o People with spinal-cord injuries report less intense emotions
o The closer damage is to the brain, the greater the loss of
sensation
Specific emotional states associated with unique patterns of brain
activity, not specific brain structures
o Disgust, sadness, happiness  thalamus and pf cortex
Fear is activated by the amygdala
Emotions Are Associated with Autonomic Activity
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Emotions overlap in pattern of autonomic nervous system activity,
but there are differences
Results from actors showing various physical responses when
portraying certain emotions duplicated with Minangkabau people of
West Sumatra
Since much overlap, difficult to distinguish between emotions based
solely on autonomic responses
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Robert Zajonc hypothesized that facial expressions control the flow
of air into the brain
o Warming brain=negative emotions
o Cooling brain=positive emotions
Experiment: participants allowed air to be blown into nasal passage
People reported more negative emotions when air was warm and
more pleasant emotions when air was cool
Polygraph: no absolute measure of autonomic system indicates
presence of absence of guilt since responses vary
Utilize mixture of questions which might or might not be relevant in
order to search for telling physiological responses
Successfully identified liar 76% of time but incorrectly identified
someone as lying 37% of time
Too many false positives for wide use
o Screening employees, etc.
People can cheat the polygraph by using various methods of
controlling their physiological responses
o Tensing up during control questions and relaxing during
critical ones
o Increasing arousal: biting tongue, pressing fingernails to
palms, tightening the sphincter muscle for several seconds
New methods are being developed which utilize the brain imaging
o Only tried on trivial things, therefore not useful yet useful
The Amygdala and the Prefrontal Cortex Are Involved in Emotions
 James Papez (1937) proposed that many diff. subcortical brain
regions involved in emotions
 Paul MacLean expands list and calls it the limbic system
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Many systems outside limbic system important, while some in
limbic system aren’t central to emotion
o Hippocampus memory, hypothalamusmotivation
Two most important regions for understanding of emotion:
amygdala and prefrontal cortex
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
The Amygdala
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Processes emotional significance of stimuli and generates emotional
and behavior reactions
Developed to protect animals from danger
Most important structure for emotional learning  conditioned fear
responses
Removal in animals causes Kluver-Bucy syndrome
Kluver-Bucy syndrome: engage in unusual behavior:
hypersexuality, putting objects in mouth, fearless.
In humans, damage to amygdala causes deficits in processing and
responding to emotional cues
o Impairment in conditioning
Fear when confronted with dangerous objects but not conditioned
fear response
o Blue square+electric shock
 Do not develop physiological arousal to blue square like
normal people, but she can tell you that there is an
association
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S.P. had right amygdala removed to reduce frequency of seizures
Normal everything except for fear conditioning
Information to amygdala via 2 paths:
o Fast: quick and dirty—processes sensory information
immediately
 Thalamus  Amygdala for processing
o Slow: more thorough and deliberate evaluations
 Thalamus  Sensory Cortex  Amygdala
 EX: perceiving hose as snake and responding=fast path
 EX: realizing that it is a hose and stopping fear
response=slow path
Appears that the amygdala modifies how hippocampus consolidates
memory
o Supported by correlation between activity of amygdala and
hippocampus in studies
Other processing: perceiving social stimuli such as perception of
facial expressions
fMRI studies show activation of amygdala in response to fearful
faces
More activation for fearful faces than angry ones
o Activated for many emotions, but greatest activation for fear
Damage to amygdala leads to social impairments
o Difficulty in evaluating intensity of fearful facial expressions
o Cannot make accurate interpersonal judgments
o Can tell smile from frown but do not use in making social
judgments
o Cannot gauge trustworthiness and are unusually friendly to
strangers
The Prefrontal Cortex
 Involved in assessing potential reward value of situations
 Also involved in processing emotional cues, especially if related to
interpersonal interactions
 Damage leads to inappropriate behavior: insensitive to emotional
expression of others or excessive aggression and violence
o Difficulty with emotional control
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Ex: Elliot having trouble with somatic markers: can explain
emotional things without the emotional experience
Emotion Systems Are Lateralized in the Brain
 Cerebral asymmetry: emotional pattern associated with unequal
activation of the left and right frontal lobes.
 Greater activation of right pf cortex =negative affect
 Greater activation of left hemisphere=positive affect
 Video clips: left-hemisphere dominant had most positive response
to pleasant scenes while right-hemisphere showed most negative
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response to unpleasant scenes
Greater left hemisphere activation: increased confidence and effort
to achieve goals
Greater right hemisphere activation: lack of motivation
Studies lead to belief that cerebral asymmetry might be important
in regulating emotional states
Experiment: anti-anxiety drugs given to monkeys—less fearful
behavior and increased left frontal activation
Research suggests that right hemisphere is more involved in
interpretation and comprehension of emotional material
Brain imaging: both hemispheres activated with emotions, but right
one shows more activation
Right: detecting emotional tone of speech
Left: decoding semantic content
Note: I did not go into the health aspect because Professor Mitchell did not
cover it in midterms and, I assume, will not include it in the final. Also, I
believe we don’t have to be able to distinguish between the various theories
of emotion since not even he can remember them but I figured a quick
overview would not hurt.
-Nick López