 Our emotional state is closely related to our motivation. For each behavior that
you perform there is an accompanying feeling about that action. Emotion
influences motivation, and motivation influences emotion.
 Psychologists who study emotion explore and explain the physiological states,
cognitive experiences, and measurable behaviors that accompany feelings.
 Where do emotions come from? Why do we have them? What are they made of?
 Emotions are the body’s adaptive response. They exist not to give us interesting
experiences but to enhance our survival.
 Think about when you face challenges. Emotions focus our attention and energize
our actions.
 Describe what someone who is overwhelmingly happy would look like. Draw or
discuss.
 Emotion  a response of the whole organism, involving (1) physiological arousal,
(2) expressive behaviors, and (3) conscious experience.
 For example, let’s say a parent losses their child in a crowded mall. Their 3 points of
emotions would be:
 (1) physiological arousal – heart pounding
 (2) expressive behaviors – running around the mall looking for their child
 (3) conscious experience –thinking ‘Is this a kidnapping?’.
THEORIES OF EMOTION
Does your heart pound
because you are afraid...
or are you afraid because you
feel your heart pounding?
Theories of emotion have focused on two key
questions.
Which comes first, physiological arousal or
the subjective or one-sided experience of an
emotion?
Can we react emotionally before appraising
a situation, or does thinking always precede
emotion?
 The theories of emotion complement each other. That
means that each one provides some explanation into why
or how we experience emotions. Let’s look at five different
theories. They are:
 James-Lange Theory of Emotion
 Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotion
 Schacter’s Two Factor Theory of Emotion
 Zajonc’s Theory of Emotion and
 Lazarus’ Theory of Emotion.
James-Lange Theory  the theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness
of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli.
Cannon-Bard Theory  the theory that an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously
triggers (1) physiological responses and (2) the subjective experience of emotion.
 Cannon and Bard disagreed with the James-Lange theory of
emotion. They noted that the heart races when we feel a range
of emotions – fear, anger, excitement. They proposed that an
emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers
physiological responses and the subjective experience of
emotion. In other words they happen at the same time.
 Each of these theories helps us to understand emotion. We
observe changes in our bodies and we know that the brain and
nervous system play a role in our conscious feelings. Recent
research links hormone levels to emotion, namely, testosterone
levels are linked to aggression. But what comes first, our
thoughts about a situation or our experience of the emotion?
Two-Factor Theory  the Schachter-Singer theory that to experience emotion one
must (1) be physically aroused and (2) cognitively label the arousal.
 Schacter in the 1960s developed the two-factor theory of
emotion. He pointed out that both our physical responses
and our cognitive labels which are our mental
interpretations combine to cause any particular emotional
response. Emotion depends on two factors, biology and
cognition. The key to this theory is the label that we give to
the feeling. Our physical experiences of emotion are so
similar that we must appraise and label our reactions in
order to experience an emotion.
Theories of emotions
 Zajonc in the 1980s argued that emotion and cognition are separate, and that our
interpretations of situations are sometimes slower than our emotional reactions.
 For example, before we know what we think about a situation, we know how we feel
about it.
 He believes that the pathways in our brain carry or transmit messages. Some take
a short cut and go directly to the amygdala which is the emotion control center in
the brain.
 It is because of these shortcuts that our feelings are more likely to control our
thoughts, than our thoughts are to control our feelings.
 Zajonc believes that emotions are basic to human existence, and that they
developed before cognition in the history of our species.
 Lazarus in the 1990s agreed that our brain can process
information outside of our conscious awareness, and that
some emotional responses do not require conscious
thought.
 But, he believed that there must be at least a minimal
amount of unconscious thinking, even for emotions that we
feel instantly. This is how we know what we’re reacting to.
COGNITION AND EMOTION
 The brain’s shortcut for emotions
TWO ROUTES TO EMOTION
 For our complex emotions such as love, happiness, shame
and guilt, there is a conscious interpretation, appraisal, and
memory of earlier experiences. In other words, how we
think about the situation also affects these emotions.
 If you think positively about a situation it makes you feel
better.
 If you think negatively about a situation it makes you feel
worse.
How many emotions are there? Well, Plutchik in the 1980s argued that there
are eight basic emotions and that each emotion is related to survival.
 Anger which leads to destruction of the obstacle.
 Fear which leads to protection.
 Sadness which leads to a search for help and comfort.
 Disgust which leads to rejection and pushing away.
 Surprise which leads to a turning inward.
 Curiosity which leads to exploration and searching.
 Acceptance which leads to sharing.
 Joy which leads to reproduction, courting, and mating.
TWO DIMENSIONS OF EMOTION
Positive
valence
pleasant
relaxation
joy
Low
arousal
High
arousal
fear
anger
sadness
Negative
valence
 Emotions involve the body big time.
 Feeling without a body is like breathing without lungs.
 Remember the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS)? Mobilizes your body for action
and calms it when the crisis passes. Without any sort of conscious thought, your
body will prepare you actively for fight or flight.
 Sympathetic nervous system –CRISIS IN FULL SWING
 Arousing – sugar in bloodstream, increased respiration, heart rate and blood
pressure increase, etc.
 Stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline released
 Parasympathetic nervous system – CRISIS PASSES
 Calming – opposite of above.
 Stress hormones are not released, diminished arousal.
 Moderate arousal is ideal- somewhere in the middle. Ex. Moderate arousal
during a test, alert but not flipping your lid.
Emotions and the Autonomic
Nervous System
 Different movie experiment – Page 370… let’s read together!
 Differences in brain activity can be seen in different emotions.
 Amygdala – emotional response centre, especially for registering
fearful emotions.
 Frontal lobes - negative emotions on the right, positive emotions on
the left. Ex. Stroke on the right, only happy emotions.
 Nucleus accumbens – region of neurons that light up when people
experience natural or drug induced pleasures. Electrical
stimulation of this area has helped produce more positive feeling in
depressed individuals.
 Emotions are felt all through the body Ex. Victims of paralysis and
their interpretation of emotions – ‘Less fiery, more mental’.
 Polygraph  a machine, commonly used in attempts to detect lies,
that measure several of the physiological responses accompanying
emotion (such as perspiration and cardiovascular and breathing
changes).
 Polygraph article.
 What is the connection between how we think and what we feel?
 Can we experience emotion apart from thinking?
 Do we become what we think?
 Whoaaa dude… heavy stuff.
 Arousal fuels emotions, cognition channels it
 Spill Over Effect – Sometimes our arousal response to one event spills over into our response to the
next event.
 Schachter-Singer experiment – Aroused college men with the hormone epinephrine. Then to a
waiting room with a person who is either acting euphoric or irritated. As the subject observes this
person, their heart rate increases, body flushes and breathing increases. Some subjects were told
they were feeling this response because of the injection and said they felt very little emotion. Some
subjects were told the injection caused no effects. These subjects ‘caught’ the emotion of the people
in the room.
 A stirred up state can be experienced as one emotion or another very different one, depending on
how we interpret and label it.
 Influence of the amygdala –
Sensory input of emotions
may be routed directed the
amygdala (via the thalamus)
for instant emotional
reactions or to the cortex for
analysis. This allows for quick
emotional responses to
situations, rather than the
longer, drawn out ideas that
are required with deepened
emotional thinking.
 Ex. Snap judgment versus
‘Sleep on it’.
Ekman’s Studies on Facial
Expressions
Interview with Ekman
 Research has shown that biological females are better at reading the
nonverbal emotions we as a species express than biological males. It has
also shown that both biological males and biological females are better at
the body language of someone else of their own gender than of the
opposite gender.
 Biological Males and biological females express emotion differently.
Biological females tend to smile more, gesture more and have altogether a
more expressive face than biological males.
 Why is this like this? Are biological females and biological males
physiologically different or have they each learned to behave differently?
DISCUSS!
 There seems to be three factors that affect the way we learn to express and
interpret emotions.
 1. Power is the key issue when we are interpreting nonverbal communication. The
person with the less power is more motivated to read the nonverbal cues of the
person who has more power. Gender doesn’t seem to matter here.
 2. Culture can also influence how we express emotions and how we interpret the
emotions of others. There are things called display rules that are culturally based
and tell you how and when a person may express emotion. These include things
like when to smile, what to do when you are angry, and when to look someone in
the eye.
 3. People raised in expressive families or in cultures that value being emotionally
expressive are likely to be more expressive. Once again, gender doesn’t matter.
 Reading people’s body language,
listening to their tone of voice and
studying their voices, help us to
detect emotion.
 There are called nonverbal cues. The
best non verbal cues we can detect
are those associated with threats.
Even in another language, we can
detect anger and aggression.
 Duchenne smile –Activated
muscles under eyes and raised
cheek bones dictate a genuine
smile. Which one is fake? Which is
natural?
 Without body language, emotion can be difficult to interpret.
 Think about when writing an email or text message how the tone of your message
and can changed.
 You are judged solely on your words and emotions can be very hard to convey…
emojis help!
 When meeting someone they have only known electronically, most people are
surprised at what ‘type’ of person they are, personality wise.
 Story on Page 379 – Jackie Larson
 When given ‘thin slices’ of emotional interaction, women generally surpass men on
at reading people’s emotional cues.
 This also may give women an advantage in spotting lies, or sensing real romantic
attraction between people, or general relationships between people (ex. Who is a
supervisor, who is the employee).
 Men tend to use simpler emotional reactions (I feel sad that my friend is moving
away) while women tend to use more complex (It’s a bittersweet moment. I feel
both happy and sad).
 Exception: Anger is seen as a more masculine emotion and when asked to envision
an angry face, most people place it as male.
While the face on the left is seen as more gender neutral, when the same
face is made ‘angry’, it is seen as more male by more people.
 Do facial expressions have different meanings in other cultures?
 Different facial expressions were shown to different people around the world and
they were asked to guess the expression.
 Most people identified them consistently across cultures.
 However, not always the case – USA captured soldiers, North Korea 1968 – Hawaiian
Good Luck Sign ;)
 Even blind people make the same facial expression as sighted people when
expressing different emotions.
 The reasoning behind facial muscles may be evolutionary. Before expressive
language, they were used to convey threats, greeting and submissions, which
helped them to survive.
 This may help to explain why all humans share the same facial muscle expressions
associated with emotion.
 The amount of emotion a culture will express will differ. For example, cultures that
encourage individuality, such as North America, display mostly visible emotions. In
Chinese culture, where people are encouraged to adjust to others, the emotions are
much more with held.
 Try this! What facial expression would you make when trying to think of the answer
to a hard question? How does this differ in Japan?
Levels of Analysis for the Study of
Emotion
 Expressions not only communicate emotion, they also amplify and regulate it. Ex. If
you want to truly feel cheerful, having a body position that is cheerful will help.
 Facial Feedback  the effect of facial expressions on experienced emotions, as
when a facial expression of anger or happiness intensifies feelings of anger or
happiness.
 Fake a big grin. Now scowl. Smile therapy!
 In an experiment where subjects were asked to contract their facial muscles and
bring their eyebrow together, a scowling face occurred. Subjects then
communicated that they felt more angry after the test by simply mimicking the
facial expression.
Pen test coming up in next slide. Books away! ½
with eyes closed.
Rate the funny level of this comic
from 1 – 10.
Rate the funny level of this comic
from 1 – 10.
 According to psychologists, there are 10 distinct, isolated emotions:
1)
Joy
2)
Interest-excitement
3)
Surprise
4)
Sadness
5)
Anger
6)
Disgust
7)
Contempt
8)
Fear
9)
Shame
10)
Guilt
Do you think any are missing? Some argue that pride and love are missing. Some argue that love is simply
a mix of a bunch together.
 Fear is contagious. In 1903, during a comedy show a small fire broke out. Someone
yelled out ‘FIRE’! Even though the comedian onstage tried to reassure the crowd,
over 500 people died in the 10 minutes before the fire department even got there
to put out the fire. How did they die? By being trampled while trying to escape.
 Fear is adaptive. It allows our bodies to flee from danger. It binds people together
and protects us from harm. Fear helps us focus on problems and come up with
solutions.
 Fearful expressions improve peripheral vision and speed eye movements, boosting
sensory input.
 This is the adaptive value of fear.
 You can be afraid of almost
anything… remember Baby Albert
with white furry bunnies?
 When infants begin to crawl and
walk, they fall down. This may create
a fear of heights.
 Wild monkeys are afraid of snakes.
Monkeys in labs are not. When reared
together, the lab monkeys became
scared of snakes as they saw the wild
monkeys resist food with snakes near
it. Therefore, fear can be learned.
 We fear things that may harm us – spiders, snakes, heights, etc.
 These are usually evolutionary leftovers designed to keep us alive in the past.
 However, they do not prepare us to be afraid of more modern dangers, such as
cars, bombs and electricity.
 Understanding fear lies in the amygdala. It associates various emotions with
certain situations. Ex. Rabbits fear a noise, when it is associated with a small shock.
Unless their amygdala is damaged. Then no fear.
 Some people have fears that run outside of the normal levels.
 These are called phobias and disrupt their ability to cope with normal life.
 Ex. Agoraphobia – fear of leaving ones house.
 On the flip side. Some people can also use fear to fuel reactions in stressful
situations. Ex. Astronauts seem to be able to cope in highly stressful, life
threatening situations…. Ever see Gravity or Interstellar?
 Genes can also play a role in fear. Identical twins tend to have the same fear level.
 Serotonin reuptake is slowed in people who seem to experience higher levels of
fear.
 The smallest incidences can make us angry. It is evoked by events and can be different
for each person.
 What makes you angry? Is there anything that makes you angry that doesn’t seem to
both other people? DICUSS?
 There may be a benefit from anger in that it helps us to release and express the feelings
we are having. Retaliating against a provoker may make you feel better.
 This is called Catharsis  emotional release. The catharsis hypothesis maintains that
“releasing’ aggressive energy (through action or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges.
 However, releasing anger can sometimes increase anger. It may provoke further
retaliation, escalating minor conflicts into major ones. It can also magnify the anger into
something greater.
 Sometimes when we release our anger, we later regret it. This is maladaptive.
 The best policy may be the ‘sleep on it’ rule.
 People who are happy, perceive the world as safer, feel more confident, more
decisions more easily, rate job applicants more favourably, are more cooperative
and tolerant and live healthier, more energized and satisfied lives.
 Feel Good Phenomena  people’s tendency to be helpful when already in a good
mood.
 Well-being  self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life. Used along with
measures of objective well-being (for example, physical and economic indicators)
to evaluate people’s quality of life.
Watson’s studies – happiness peaks in the
early/middle part of peoples days.
 Happiness and Prior Experience
 Adaptation-level phenomenon  our tendency to form
judgments (of sounds, of lights, of income) relative to a neutral
level defined by our prior experience.
 Ex. If your current situation – income, academic average, social
status – increases, we feel an initial surge of happiness. We
then adapt to this new level, consider it normal and require
something even greater to bring back the surge of happiness.
 Happiness and others’ attainments
 Relative deprivation  the perception that we are worse off
relative to those with whom we compare ourselves.
 Ex. Whether we feel good or bad depends on how we compare
ourselves with others. When Alex Roriguez got a $275 million
baseball contract, others around him felt less.
 Stress  the process by which we perceive and respond to certain events, called
stressors, that we appraise as threatening or challenging.
 Stress is a necessary part of our everyday life. But stress is not all bad. Without
stress we might not be motivated to finish things that we need to accomplish. Too
much stress and how we deal with it can have negative effects on our health.
 As stress becomes more and more prevalent in people’s lives, both physically and
mentally a new branches of psychology have popped up: Behavioural medicine 
an interdisciplinary field that integrates behavior and medical knowledge and
applies that knowledge to health and disease and health psychology  a subfield
of psychology that provides psychology's contribution to behavioral medicine.
Both fields are trying to address some of the
following questions:
1) How do our emotions and personality influence
our risk of disease?
2) What attitudes and behaviors help prevent illness
and promote health and wellbeing?
3) How do our perceptions of a situation determine
the stress we feel?
4) How can we reduce or control stress?
 The term stressor is used to describe the factors creating
stress.
 The stress reaction is the defense used to respond to or
conquer stress.
 Remember, stress is a process of perceiving and
responding. Our appraisal of an event as potentially
threatening or challenging can make a huge difference in
what we experience and in how effective we respond.
 Depending to how you react to stressors, your health many
suffer. If you see a stressor as a threat, you’re far more
likely to panic and freeze up. If you view the stressor as a
challenge, your response will be focused, and you’re more
likely to overcome the obstacle. Your perception directly
affects your emotional responses.
 Our emotional responses to stress vary, but so do our
physical responses.
STRESS APPRAISAL
Appraisal
Response
Threat
(“Yikes! This is
beyond me!”)
Panic, freeze up
Challenge
(“I’ve got to apply
all I know”)
Aroused, focused
Stressful event
(tough math test)
 Walter Cannon in the 1920s found that stressors trigger the release of stress
hormones into the nervous system. This increases your heart rate, dulls your
sensation of pain, and sends more blood to your larger muscles. This is the flight
or fight response that we talked earlier in this course.
Cerebral cortex
(perceives stressor)
Thalamus
Hypothalamus
Pituitary hormone in the
bloodstream stimulates
the outer part of the adrenal
gland to release the stress
hormone cortisol
Pituitary gland
Sympathetic nervous
system releases the
stress hormones
epinephrine and
norepinephrine
from nerve endings
in the inner part of
the adrenal glands
Adrenal glands
Selye’s general adaptation syndrome (GAS)
 Selye’s concept of the body’s adaptive
response to stress in three phases – alarm,
resistance, exhaustion.
3 Parts:
 Alarm
 Resistance
 Exhaustion
An alarm reaction happens when
your nervous system is activated
following an emotional or physical
trauma – like in Cannon’s flight or
fight response. Your body is ready for
the challenge.
 In this phase, stress-related hormones keep your
respiration, temperature, and blood pressure high. But your
body can’t keep this pace. Your body’s reserves become
depleted. It appears that the hippocampus shrinks when
these hormones are released. Remember that this brain
structure is responsible for memory. There has been
research to indicate that those people experiencing trauma
may experience memory difficulties.
With exhaustion comes greater
susceptibility to illness and disease.
Our bodies can handle temporary
stress but prolonged stress will
produce physical deterioration.
Stress and Illness
General Adaptation Syndrome
 Catastrophes – Can you think of an example?
 In the wake of catastrophes physiological disorder rates soar.
 Significant life changes - Can you think of an example?
 Young people experience significant stress when going into college/university, etc.
 Daily hassles - Can you think of an example?
 Daily hassles have been shown to cause the most damage to people over time.
Catastrophes are large, unpredictable,
and life-threatening events. Examples
include earthquakes, war, floods,
tornados, and fire. Catastrophes often
mean prolonged exposure to stress
which puts us in psychological and
physical risk due to the stress
Significant personal changes in your
life are the second category of
stressors. These can include the
death of a loved one, leaving home,
living on your own, divorce, and any
kind of life transition.
 Daily stress can be thought of as hassles. Every incident by itself is
not a big deal.
 Hassles that are continually being repeated can have an effect on
your health depending on your reaction to them.
 The persistent hassles in the work place can produce physical,
mental and emotional exhaustion. This is often referred to as
burnout.
 The results of burnout include depression from the emotional
exhaustion, a decrease in performance or productivity from the
physical exhaustion, and cynicism or pessimism from the mental
exhaustion.
The effect on your health that life events
may have depends on how you appraise
the situation and your own personal
outlook.
If you think of the stressor in a
negative way and as something
that is beyond your control then
your health may be impacted.
This is called having a pessimistic
outlook.
On the other hand, being positive and feeling
that you have a sense of control is called
having an optimistic outlook. Optimism
seems to offer some protection against the
effects of stress by affecting the immune
system. Those with strong immune systems
are less likely to become or fatigued.
 Once again there is interplay between mind (your
perceptions or appraisals) and body (your physiology).
How is the immune system involved? Stress hormones are
released which use up your body’s reserves of disease
fighting white blood cells. The immune system is then
weakened to fight off disease. This can have a huge impact
on minor illnesses. But is there an impact on major
illnesses like cancer and heart disease? We can’t know for
sure, but we do see people who have these diseases having
more stress in their lives.
 The heart is the organ we see the most common connection between disease and
stress.
 Coronary Heart Disease  the clogging of the vessels that nourish the heart
muscle; the leading cause of death in North America.
 Research has shown that there seems to be connection between stress and heart
problems. High levels of stress increase the risk of heart disease. Friedman and
Rosenman discovered this connection over 50 years ago. Their findings led to the
terms Type A and Type B personalities.
 Type A personality  These people tend to be impatient, competitive, hard-
driving, verbally aggressive, and anger-prone. They are more likely to have heart
attacks.
 Type B personality  These people tend to be more laid-back, easygoing, and
relaxed. They are less likely to have heart attacks.
 Psychophysiological Illness literally, “mind-body” illness; any stress-related physical
illness, such as hypertension and some headaches.
 Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI)  the study of how psychological, neural, and
endocrine processes together affect the immune system and resulting health.
 Lymphocytes the two types of white blood cells that are part of the body’s immune
system; B lymphocytes form in the bone marrow and release antibodies that fight
bacterial infections; T lymphocytes form in the thymus and other lymphatic tissue and
attack cancer cells, viruses, and foreign substances.
 Wounds in stressed animals will heal slower.
 Colds and flus take longer to pass in stressed humans.
 Most people over 100 years of age tend to be able to ‘manage stress’ easier.
 Sick days put into peoples schedules as a way to allow people time to get better without
‘stressing over it’.
Cancer and Stress
 The research on the relationship between cancer and stress is not definitive. This
means that some studies have shown a connection between stress and cancer and
other studies that have found no connection of any significance. The research has
shown that stress does not appear to create cancer cells and stress definitely
affects the body ability to fight off disease.
AIDS and Stress
 If stress restrains the immune systems response to infections, it also will exacerbate
the course of AIDS in humans. People who are stressed tend to progress from HIV
into AIDS faster and they decline faster once AIDS has been developed.
STRESS AND DISEASE
UCS
(drug)
 Conditioning of
immune
suppression
UCR
(immune
suppression)
CS
(sweetened
water)
CS
(sweetened
water)
UCS
(drug)
UCR
(immune
suppression)
CR
(immune
suppression)
STRESS AND DISEASE
 Negative emotions and health-related
consequences
Heart
disease
Persistent stressors
and negative
emotions
Unhealthy behaviors
(smoking, drinking,
poor nutrition and sleep)
Release of stress
hormones
Immune
suppression
Autonomic nervous
system effects
(headaches,
hypertension)