Theories of EmotionEmotionPhysiological arousal (heart pounding)Expressive behaviors (quickened pace

Theories of Emotion

Emotion

Physiological arousal (heart pounding)
Expressive behaviors (quickened pace)
Conscious experience, including thoughts and feelings

Controversial Ideas

Does physiological arousal precede or follow your emotional experience?
Does cognition (thinking) precede emotion (feeling)?

Theories of Emotion

Commonsense View: First comes conscious awareness, then the physiological trimmings. (Ex.: we cry because we are sad)
James-Lange Theory: the theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli. (Physiological activity precedes the emotional experience)
Cannon-Bard Theory: the theory that physiological arousal and our emotional experience occur simultaneously. (One does not cause the other)
Two-Factor Theory: Schachter-Singer’s theory that to experience emotion one must be physically aroused and cognitively label the arousal.
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Embodied Emotion

Emotions and the Autonomic Nervous System

Theautonomic nervous system controls arousal.
It’ssympathetic division mobilizes us for action by directing adrenals to release stress hormones, which in turn increase heart rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels, and by triggering other defensive physical reactions.
Theparasympathetic division calms us after a crisis has passed, through arousal diminishes gradually.

Arousal and Performance

Very high or very low arousal can be disruptive.
We perform best when arousal is moderate, though this varies with the difficulty of the task.
For easy or well-learned tasks, best performance is linked to high arousal.
For difficult tasks, performance peaks at lower levels.

Physiological Similarities/Differences Among Specific Emotions

Physiological responses to the emotions of fear, anger, and sexual arousal are very similar.
Emotional experiences (and sometimes our facial expressions) differ during these three states.
Physical responses, like finger temperature and movement of facial muscles, change during fear, rage, and joy
The amygdala shows differences in activation during the emotions of anger and rage. The activity of the left hemisphere (happy) is different from the right (depressed) for emotions.

Cognition and Emotion

Thespillover effect occurs when our arousal from one event influences our response to other events.
Arousal fuels emotion, cognition channels it
Emotional responses are immediate when sensory input goes directly to the amygdala via the thalamus, bypassing the cortex, triggering a rapid reaction that is often outside our conscious awareness.
Responses to complex emotions (such as guilt, happiness, and love) require interpretation and are routed along the slower route to the cortex for analysis.
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Lie Detection

Polygraph: a machine, commonly used in attempts to detect lies, that measures several of the physiological responses accompanying emotion (such as perspiration and cardiovascular and breathing changes).

Embodied Emotion

People’s expressive behavior reveals their emotion.
Emotions are expressed on the face, by the body, and tone of voice.

Nonverbal Communication

Most of us are good at deciphering emotions through non-verbal communication.
We can usually detect anger in another language.
We read anger and fear in the eyes and happiness in the mouth.
In a crowd of faces, a single angry face will “pop out” faster than a single happy face.

Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior

Women are much better at discerning nonverbal emotions than men.
When shown sad, happy, and scary film clips, women expressed more emotions than men.
Women surpass men in conveying happiness, but men communicate anger better.

But as with everything, this could also be caused by nurture. But this is just what tends to happen; there’s a pattern

Detecting and Computing Emotion

Facial muscles reveal signs of emotion.
Most people find it difficult to detect deceiving emotions

Culture and Emotional Expression

The meaning of gestures varies with culture, but many facial expressions, such as those of happiness and fear, are found all over the world, indicating that these expressions are culturally universal aspects of emotion.
Cultures differ in the amount of emotional expression they consider acceptable.
Some emotional expressions help us to take in more sensory information or to avoid taking in toxic substances.
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The Effects of Facial Expressions

Thefacial feedback hypothesis proposes that expressions amplify our emotions by activating muscles associated with specific states, and the muscles signal the body to respond as though we were experiencing those states.
Thebehavior feedback hypothesis assumes that if we move our body as we would when experiencing some emotion, we are likely to feel that emotion to some degree.

Experienced Emotion

Corroll Izard’s research found the 10 basic emotions of joy, interest-excitement, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame, and guilt.
Most of them are present in infancy, except for contempt, shame and guilt.
Some psychologists believe that pride and love may also be basic emotions.
Emotions can be placed along two basic dimensions: arousal (high versus low) and valence (pleasant, or positive, versus unpleasant, or negative).

Fear

Fear can torment us, rob us of sleep, and preoccupy our thinking.
Fear can be adaptive. It makes us run away from danger, it brings us closer as groups, and it protects us from injury and harm.
We learn specific dears through conditioning (associating emotions with specific situations) and through observational learning (watching others display fear in response to certain events or surroundings).
We are biologically prepared to learn some fears (snakes, spiders, heights) but not others (fast driving, bombs, electricity).
The amygdala plays a key role in fear learning, associating fear with specific situations.
The amygdala receives information from cortical areas that process emotion, and it sends information to other areas that produce the bodily symptoms of fear.
People differ in the extent to which they are fearful or fearless, and part of that difference is genetic.

Anger

Causes of anger:

People generally become angry with friends and loved ones who commit wrongdoings, especially if they are willful, unjustified, and avoidable.
Foul odors, high temperatures, traffic jams, and aches and pains also anger people.

Catharsis: emotional release.
Research does not support the catharsis hypothesis (the idea that releasing negative energy will calm aggressive tendencies).
Venting rage may calm us temporarily, but in the long run it does not reduce anger and may actually amplify it.
Anger is better handled by waiting until the level physical arousal diminishes, calming oneself, and expressing in grievances in ways that promote reconciliation rather than retaliation.
When reconciliation fails, forgiveness can reduce one’s anger and its physical symptoms.
Anger breeds prejudice.

Happiness

People who are happy perceive the world as being safer.
They are able to make decisions easily, are more cooperative, rate job applicants more favorably, and live healthier, energized, and more satisfied lives.
Feel-good, do-good phenomenon: people’s tendency to be helpful when already in a good mood.
Research in positive psychology is currently exploring the causes and consequences of subjective well-being (self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life), supplementing psychology’s traditional focus on negative emotions.

The Short Life of Emotional Ups and Downs

Negative emotion is highest just after we wake up and before we go to sleep.
Positive emotion rises gradually, peaking about seven hours after we rise, then falls gradually.
The moods triggered by the day’s good or bad events seldom last beyond that day.
Over the long run, our emotional ups and downs tend to balance.

Wealth and Well-Being

At a basic level, money helps us avoid pain by enabling better nutrition, health care, education, and science, and these, in turn, increase happiness.
Increases in wealth can also increase happiness in the short term. But in the longer term, research does not show an increase in happiness accompanying affluence at either the individual or national level.

Two Psychological Phenomena: Adaption and Comparison

Adaption-level phenomenon: our tendency to assess stimuli (including material possessions) by contrasting them with a neutral level that changes with our experience.
Relative deprivation: the perception that one is worse off than others with whom one compares oneself.
Happiness is relative to both our past experience and our comparisons with others.

Predictors of Happiness