Basic Emotions
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Fear, surprise, anger, disgust, happiness, sadness
Basic emotions are innate (inborn) and “hard-wired”
Complex emotions are a blend of many aspects of
emotions
Classified along two dimensions
1. Pleasant or unpleasant
2. Level of activation or arousal associated with the emotion
Concept of Emotion
• Simply stated: Categories of feelings caused by
things in the environment that are important to us
– stimuli that produce high arousal generally produce
strong feelings
– are rapid and automatic
– emerged through natural selection to benefit survival
and reproduction – evolutionary perspective
– There are a limited number of basic emotions that
all humans, in every culture, experience.
– People often experience a blend of emotions or
mixed emotions, rather than a pure emotion.
Functions of Emotion
• Move us to act, triggering motivated
behavior
• Help us to set goals, but emotional
states can also be goals in themselves.
(I want to be happy)
• Involved in rational decision making
and purposeful behavior.
• Emotional intelligence is the capacity
to understand and manage:
– your own emotional experiences
– to perceive, comprehend, and
respond appropriately to the
emotional responses of others.
The Subjective Experience of
Emotion
People vary in their experience of emotion in the
following ways:
• People vary greatly in the intensity of their
emotions
• The sexes differ little in their experience of
emotions
• The sexes differ in the expression of emotion:
women are more emotionally expressive
Culture & Emotional Experience
• Studies of Japanese subjects added a third
dimension, interpersonal engagement—the
degree to which an emotion involves
relationships with others.
• Because Japan is a collectivistic culture, one’s
identity is seen as interdependent with those of
other people, rather than independent, as is
characteristic of individualistic cultures
The Neuroscience of
Emotion
The Nervous System & Emotion
Biology of Emotion:
An Overview
• View ABC Report on Science of Happiness (8 min)
• Do genes or life experiences have the most effect on
emotion?
• Do we have a “happiness set-point?”
• Can we change our brain through meditation?
• View Psychology: The Human Experience DVD Segment
20 on Physiology of Emotion (3:04)
• What were early studies on the biology of emotion focused
on?
• What do modern studies focus on?
• What did scientists learn from stroke victims about the left
& right frontal lobes when it comes to emotions?
Divisions of the Nervous System
Autonomic Nervous System
• The division of the peripheral nervous system that
controls the glands and muscles of the internal organs
• Monitors the autonomic functions
• Controls breathing, blood pressure, and digestive
processes
• Divided into the sympathetic and parasympathetic
nervous systems
• Cross-cultural studies have demonstrated that the basic
emotions are associated with distinct patterns of
autonomic nervous system activity
Divisions of the Nervous System
Sympathetic Nervous System
• The part of the autonomic nervous
system that arouses the body to deal
with perceived threats
• Fight or flight response
Divisions of the Nervous System
Parasympathetic Nervous System
• The part of the autonomic nervous
system that calms the body
• Brings the body back down to a
relaxed state
Autonomic Nervous System
Autonomic Nervous System
Autonomic Nervous System
Autonomic Nervous System
Autonomic Nervous System
Autonomic Nervous System
Autonomic Nervous System
Fear: A Closer Look
The Role of Brain in Emotion
Physical Arousal and Emotions
• Sympathetic nervous system is aroused with
emotions (fight-or-flight response)
• Different emotions stimulate different responses
– Fear—decrease in skin temperature (cold-feet)
– Anger—increase in skin temperature (hot under the
collar)
• A recent study using PET scans found that each of
four emotions (sadness, happiness, anger, and fear)
produced a distinct pattern of brain activation and
deactivation
• This indicates that each emotion involves distinct
neural circuits in the brain
High Arousal
• Arousal response - pattern of physiological
change that helps prepare the body for “fight
or flight”
– muscles tense, heart rate and breathing increase, release
of endorphins, focused attention
– can be helpful or harmful
– in general, high arousal is beneficial for instinctive,
well-practiced or physical tasks
– harmful for novel (new), creative, or careful judgment
tasks
• Some arousal is
necessary
• High arousal is helpful
on easy tasks
• As level of arousal
increases, quality of
performance decreases
with task difficulty
• Too much arousal is
harmful
Quality of performance
Yerkes-Dodson Law
Easy task
Moderately
difficult task
Very difficult task
Degree of arousal
Brain-Based Theory of
Emotions
• Amygdala
– evaluate the significance of stimuli and generate
emotional responses
– generate hormonal secretions and autonomic
reactions that accompany strong emotions
– damage causes “psychic blindness” and the
inability to recognize fear in facial expressions and
voice
Brain-Based Theory of Emotions
• Frontal lobes
– influence people’s conscious emotional feelings and
ability to act in planned ways based on feelings (e.g.,
effects of prefrontal lobotomy)
Frontal
Parietal
Occipital
Temporal
left frontal lobe
may be most
involved in
processing
positive emotions
right frontal lobe
involved with
negative emotions
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How You Experience Fear
When a person is faced with a potentially threatening
stimulus, the visual stimulus is first routed to the
thalamus.
Information is then relayed simultaneously along two
neural pathways:
1.
2.
Low Road: crude, archetypal information travels rapidly to the
amygdala (in the limbic system),
High Road: More detailed information travels to the visual
cortex, where the stimulus is interpreted
• If the cortex determines that a threat exists,
the information is relayed to the amygdala
along the longer, slower pathway.
Amygdala then sends information
along two pathways
1. One pathway leads to an area of the hypothalamus, then
on to the medulla; together, they trigger arousal of the
sympathetic nervous system
2. Another pathway leads to a different hypothalamus area
that, in concert with the pituitary gland, triggers the
release of stress hormones.
• Joseph LeDoux believes that the direct thalamus–
amygdala connection represents an adaptive response
that has been hard-wired by evolution in the human
brain.
• The indirect route allows more complex stimuli to be
evaluated in the cortex.
Fear Pathway in the Brain
When you’re faced with a potentially threatening
stimulus—like a snake dangling from a stick—
information arrives in the thalamus (blue) and is
relayed simultaneously along two pathways.
Crude, archetypal information rapidly travels the
direct route to the amygdala (red), triggering an
almost instantaneous fear response. More
detailed information is sent along the pathway to
the visual cortex (blue), where the stimulus is
interpreted. If the cortex determines that a
threat exists, the information is relayed to the
amygdala along the longer, slower pathway. The
amygdala triggers other brain structures, such
as the hypothalamus, which activate the
sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine
system’s release of stress hormones.
I Have Had it with
these ?#@*&%!
SNAKES!
Applications of
Neuroscience &
Emotion
Lie Detection
• The polygraph doesn’t really detect lies.
• Some of its many problems include:
– false negative results,
– false positive results,
– highly subjective interpretations of the physical changes
that occur
• A variety of nonverbal cues, especially
microexpressions, are associated with deception,
but no single nonverbal cue indicates that someone
is lying
Are Lie Detectors Accurate?
Benjamin Kleinmuntz and Julian Szucko (1984) had polygraph experts study the
polygraph data of 50 theft suspects who later confessed to being guilty and 50 suspects
whose innocence was later established by someone's confession. Had the polygraph
experts been the judges, more than one-third of the innocent would have been declared
guilty, and almost one-fourth of the guilty would have been declared innocent.
Reading Nonverbal Communication
Facial muscles, in particular, are hard to control and can
reveal emotions that a person is trying to conceal
Trained lie-catchers can detect minute changes in facial
expressions (called microexpressions) that reveal lying.
Which is the lie and which is the truth?
The first part (about her past) is the lie.
View
beginning of
Lie to Me TV
Show where
they talk about
Microexpressi
ons (4 min)
Click Here to Play in a separate window
Brain Fingerprinting
• Uses an electroencephalograph to analyze
brain waves to determine whether a stimulus
is familiar or unfamiliar.
• The brain emits a P300 wave in response to a
familiar stimulus.
• If a suspect emits a P300 wave in response to
details that only the criminal would know, the
examiner would conclude that the suspect
possessed "guilty knowledge" of the crime.
• Brain fingerprinting is still controversial and
has only recently become admissible as
evidence in court.