Chapter 13: Emotion

Theories of Emotion
• Emotion – A response of the whole organism.
o Physiological arousal, expressive behavior, conscious experiences, subjective feelings
• Concept of Emotion:
o A class of subjective feelings caused by stimuli that have high significance to an
individual.
o Stimuli that produce high arousal generally produce strong feelings.
o Emotions are rapid and automatic.
o Emerged through natural selection to benefit survival and reproduction.

The James-Lange and Cannon-Bard Theories

• James-Lange Theory – The theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our
physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli. (1890)
o Sight of car  Pounding heart (arousal)  Fear (emotion)
• Cannon-Bard Theory – The theory that an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously
triggers (1) physiological responses and (2) the subjective experience of emotion. (1900)
o Sight of car  Pounding heart AND Fear.
• People who had spinal injuries in the war reported less fear and less anger because their
brains were not sensing the parts of the body, the heart, where those emotions come from
(James-Lange), however these men felt emotion in the head a lot more than the average man,
chocking up and crying much more than before the injury (Cannon-Bard).
• Opponent-Process Theory – (1974 Soloman and Corbit) a homeostatic theory based on
classical conditioning.
o Removal of a stimulus that excited one emotion causes a swing to another.
 A problem because this would mean that whenever one is happy it is always
followed by sad.

Cognition and Emotion

• Schachter’s Two-Factor Theory – Theory that to experience emotion one must (1) be
physically aroused and (2) cognitively label the arousal.
o Sight of car  Pounding heart (arousal) AND Cognitive Label (I’m Scared) = Fear
o Sometimes our arousal response to one event spills over into our response to the next.
 Schachter and Singer (1962) experiment – College men injected with
adrenaline and told it would not affect them, and then sent to a waiting room
where the participants met another person, who was actually part of the
experiment. This person was either happy or irritated. The college men took
on whatever emotion was observed in the waiting room because they
“needed” to attribute the rising heart rate and breathing to something.
o People become angrier if you insult them right after they have been aroused by
exercise or watching rock videos.
• Robert Zajonc argues that our emotional reactions can be quicker than our interpretations of a
situation; we therefore feel some emotions before we think.
o A subliminally flashed smiley face can prime us to feel better about a follow-up
stimulus.
o Short-cut has been found from the eyes and eyes  Thalamus  directly to the
amygdala
o We jump at the sound of rustling leaves nearby, leaving the cortex to decide later
whether the sound was made by a predator or by wind.
o The heart is not always subject to the mind.
• Richard Lazarus disagrees. He believes that emotions arise when we appraise an event as
beneficial or harmful to our well-being, whether we truly know it is or not.
o Lazarus agrees with Schachter.

Appraisal

Emotional
Event
Response

• Cognitive Appraisal Theory – Theory that individuals decide on an appropriate emotion

following the event.
• Ekman’s Facial Feedback Theory – Every basic emotion is associated with a unique facial
expression.
o Face responds fist then brain gets the body aroused.
 Sensory feedback from the expression contributes to the emotional feeling.
 Try being mean on the phone while smiling.
Summary:
- Some simple emotions (likes, dislikes, fear) involve NO conscious thinking.
- Other emotions (moods, love, and hatred) are greatly influenced by our interpretations,
memories, expectations.
 -

Positive
Valance

Low High
Arousal Arousal

Negative
Valance

Embodied Emotion
Emotion and Physiology
• Autonomic nervous system controls our arousal. Sympathetic division arouses, while the
parasympathetic calms.
• Arousal Response – pattern of physiological change that helps prepare the body for “fight
or flight”.
o Muscles tense, heart rate and breathing increase, release of endorphins, focused
attention.
o Can be helpful or harmful.
o In general, beneficial for instinctive, well-prepared, or physical tasks; harmful for
novel, creative, or careful judgment tasks.
 You don’t want high arousal when taking a test or open heart surgery.

The Physiology of Specific Emotions

• It is difficult to see the psychological differences between fear, anger, and sexual arousal.
• The finger temperatures and hormone secretions that accompany fear and rage do sometimes
differ.
• Emotions also differ in the brain circuits they use.
• As people experience negative emotions such as disgust they show more brain activity in the
right prefrontal cortex than in the left. Depression-prone people also show more right activity
• Conversely, people with positive emotions and personalities show more activity in the left
frontal lobe than in the right.
o The left frontal lobe is rich with dopamine receptors, may explain why.
• Polygraph – a machine that measures several of the physiological responses accompanying
emotion.
o Not accurate because many innocent can display the symptoms of a liar even, just by
being nervous.
o Involves “Control Questions” and “Relevant Questions”.
Expressed Emotion
Nonverbal Communication
• Humans are especially good at detecting nonverbal threats.
• In a crowd of faces, a single angry face will “pop out” faster than a single happy one.
o We read fear and anger from the eyes, happiness from the mouth.
• Experience can sensitize is to particular emotions.
Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior
• Women generally surpass men at reading people’s emotional cues.
• In studies around the world, women more than men reported themselves open to feelings.
• Women are also far more likely than men to describe themselves as empathetic.
o Females are more likely to express empathy; males tend to hide their feelings.
Detecting and Computing Emotion
• Most people find it difficult to detect deceiving emotions.
o Only secret service agents did better than 50% at detecting lies. (64%)
• With experience and training people can often catch the liar’s leaking microexpressions of
guilt, despair, and fear.
• Voltage changes on the skin reveal underlying micromuscular smiles or frowns.

Culture and Emotional Expression

• The meaning of gestures varies with the culture.
• The physiological indicators of emotion also cross cultural boundaries.
• Paul Ekman wanted to find out if people from different cultures make and interpret facial
expressions because they see them on TV or in movies. He traveled to New Guinea and
video taped them while making them react to certain make-believe situations.
o Result: American college students accurately detected each emotion that the New
Guineans portrayed.
• People blind from birth spontaneously exhibit the common facial expression associated with
joy, sadness, dear, and anger.
• People can experience a context effect when viewing facial expressions in certain situations.
o People judge an angry face set in a scary situation as afraid.
• Cultures differ in how much emotion they express.

The Effects of Facial Expressions

• Going through the motions awakens the emotions.
• One small way to become more empathetic is to let your own face mimic the other person’s
expression.

Experienced Emotion
• 10 emotions: joy, interest-excitement, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame
and guilt.
Fear
• Fear is adaptive.
o It’s an alarm system that prepares our bodies to flee danger.
• As infants become mobile, they experience falls and near-falls – and become increasingly
afraid of heights.
• Our fears reflect not only our own past traumas but also the fears we learn from our parents.
o Modeling.
• We may be biologically prepared to learn some fears more quickly than others.
• If the amygdala is damaged, we will remember the fear conditioning but not react the way we
should. We would show no emotional effect.

Anger
• Catharsis – Emotional release.
o Catharsis Hypothesis – maintains that “releasing” aggressive energy (through action
or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges.

Happiness
• People who are happy perceive the world as safer, and live healthier, more energized lives.
• Let your mood brighten and your thinking broadens and becomes more playful and creative.
• Feel-good, Do-good Phenomenon – The tendency for people to be helpful when already in
a good mood.
• Subjective Well-Being – self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life.
o Used along with measures of objective well-being (physical and emotional
indicators) to evaluate people’s quality of life.
• Your mood changes over the course of the day. Begins to decrease around the 12th hour
awake.
• Those who become blind or paralyzed usually recover near normal levels of day-to-day
happiness.
• We overestimate the long-term emotional impact of very bad news and underestimate our
capacity to adapt.
• Most people believe they would be happier if they had more money, studies show that a
relatively low income rate is where the people ranked very happy are situated.
o Economic growth in affluent countries has provided no apparent boost in morale or
social well-being.
• Those who value love more than money have higher life satisfaction.
• Adaptation-Level Phenomenon – our tendency to form judgments (of sounds, lights,
income) relative to a “neutral” level defined by our prior experience.
o Satisfaction and dissatisfaction, success and failure – all are relative to our recent
experience.
• Relative Deprivation – the perception that one is worse off relative to those with whom one
compares oneself.
o Tendency to compare ourselves to our colleagues.
• As people climb the ladder of success, the mostly compare themselves with
peers who are at or above their current status.