Agenda: 20 January
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Administrative Issues
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Enrollment
Research Participation Pool Handout
Update on coursepack & next week’s readings
In-class experiment
Today’s topic: Three Enduring Questions
Three Enduring Questions
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What is an emotion?
What causes an emotion?
Why do we have emotions?
I. What is an Emotion?
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Basic Definitions: Physiological &
Functional
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Physiological: James (1884)
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Emotion is the feeling of bodily sensations
(peripheral account, rather than central)
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Some support: facial feedback, etc.
However, correlations between cognitive,
physiological, and behavioral systems is low.
I. What is an Emotion (cont.)?
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Basic Definitions: Physiological & Functional
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Functional Definitions:
Frijda – Defined by changes in Four Systems
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Subjective feeling
Appraisal
Action readiness
Physiological response
Campos – Processes that “establish, maintain, change,
or terminate the relation between the person and the
environment on matters of significance to the person.”
I. What is an Emotion (cont.)?
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Affect subsumes mood, emotion,
temperament, preference, evaluation, etc.
Features that Distinguish Emotion from
Mood
 Time course (see p. 124 in Oatley)
 Subjective salience
 Facial expression/signature
 Specificity of eliciting event (target)
II. What Causes an Emotion?
Three Different Approaches
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Appraisal Theories (Smith & Ellsworth, etc.)
1.
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Recognition of a significant event, followed by an
evaluation of its consequences along specific
dimensions
Primary & Secondary Appraisal (Lazarus)
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Primary: Goal relevance? Goal congruence? Ego
involvement?
Secondary: How will I cope with it?
II. What Causes an Emotion
(cont.)?
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Appraisal Theories, cont.
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Dimensions of evaluation
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Pleasantness
Anticipated effort
Attentional Activity
Certainty
Agency (human, environment)
Control (self, other)
II. What Causes an Emotion
(cont.)?
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Three Different Approaches (cont.)
2. Defining Characteristics (Frijda)
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Real transgressions of concerns produce emotion
Changes in conditions lead to emotion
II. What Causes an Emotion (cont.)?
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Three Different Approaches (cont.)
3.
Neuroscience (Panksepp)
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A system of circuits that respond unconditionally to
stimuli arising from major life-challenging
circumstances; they activate or inhibit motor
subroutines as well as autonomic and hormonal
changes.
Multi-modal
response tendencies
Subjective
experience
Antecedent
conditions
Facial program
Interpersonal
Emotion
prototype
Intrapersonal
Vocalization
program
Motor program
Physiologic
support
Cognition
Appraisal
III. Why do we Have Emotions?
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One answer: Evolutionarily Adaptive
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Emotions as adaptations that solve problems
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Ekman: “primary function of emotion is to mobilize
the organism to deal quickly with important
interpersonal encounters.”
Another function is to signal action, hence fairly
universal muscle patterns in face
Emotions as “cognitive interrupts”
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(Simon) Emotions set processing priorities
III. Why do we Have Emotions
(cont.)?
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A second answer: Social Constructed
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Lutz and Averill: Cultures socialize emotion to
maintain social order
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Norms about permissible feelings
Marxist: those in power have control over feeling
rules
III. Why do we have emotions
(continued)?
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Comparison between two approaches:
Why variation across cultures?
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Evolutionary: Cultural display rules modify
already occurring emotion.
Constructed: Display rules constitute
emotional experience