Emotions
Physiological arousal
- Approach-avoidance
- Causes an experience of emotional arousal or excitement
- Emotions share features related to physiological arousal.
- Autonomic nervous system
- Controls functioning of internal organs
- Sympathetic nervous system
- “Fight or flight” response
- Prepare for vigorous activity
- Triggers
- Physical threats
- Psychological threats
- Parasympathetic nervous system
- Complimentary actions to sympathetic system
- Supports non-emergency functions
- Homeostasis
- Arousal and performance
- Arousal can be adaptive
- Degree of arousal that maximizes performance differs depending on task
- Easy or well-learned tasks
- High arousal
- Difficult or unrehearsed tasks
- Optimal arousal is somewhat less
- Opponent process principle of emotions
- When a strong emotional response occurs, an opposite emotional response
is activated to restore equilibrium in our emotional state
- Removal of a stimulus that excites one emotion causes a swing to an opposite
emotion
- Repeated experiences
- Strengthens B state but not A state
Theories of Emotion
- James-Lange Theory (1884, 1885)
- Central notion
- Environmental stimulus produces visceral changes and changes in the skeletal
muscles
- These are the source of the subjective experience or feeling of emotion
- No emotion preceding bodily response
- Prediction
- If you force your face into certain expressions then you will start to
feel the emotions associated with those expressions
- Support for hypothesis
- Mimicking the face of others should help us to feel what they are feeling
- Support for hypothesis
- Cannon-Bard Theory (1927, 1934)
- Central notion
- Emotions produce autonomic changes and the cognitive experience of emotion
independently
- Cognitive and autonomic aspects of emotion are independent
- Spinal injuries
- Cannon-Bard prediction
- Feel emotions just as strongly
- James-Lange prediction
- Wouldn't feel emotion (or feeling greatly reduced)
- George Hohmann (1966)
- Interviewed 25 soldiers who received spinal injuries
- Emotional responses to stimuli before and after injuries
- Lost sensation only in their legs
- Reported very little change in emotion
- Those who could feel nothing below the neck
- Reported a considerable decrease in emotional intensity
- Schachter-Singer theory
- Two factor theory
- Incorporates both cognition and physical arousal in interpretation of
emotion
- Two sorts of emotional experience
- One produced by cognitions arising from the individual's understanding
of the situation
- Other produced by bodily sensations
- Central notion
- Physiological state isn't the same thing as an emotion
- The situation in which arousal occurs allows us to provide a label for
the physical feeling
- Intensity of the physiological state determines intensity of the emotion
- Cognitive appraisal of the situation tells us which emotion we are feeling
- Experiment
- Physiological arousal
- Injection of epinephrine
- Informed of effects
- Not informed of effects
- Situation
- Euphoria producing
- Anger producing
- Results
- Less emotion if informed of effect of injection
Happiness
- Happiness has important consequences for many aspects of our life
- Psychology tends to focus on negative emotions
- Articles on negative emotions
- Articles on positive emotions
- Changing trend
- Subjective well-being
- Assessed as either feelings of happiness or as a sense of satisfaction
with life
- Money
- Increased affluence hardly increases happiness in the long run
- Adaptation-level principle
- Happiness relative to our prior experience
- Adjust neutral levels based on our experience.
- Notice and react to variations up and down from neutral levels
- Relative deprivation principle
- Happiness determined by our comparisons to others
- As certain level of success achieved comparison group changes
- We can increase our life satisfaction by comparing ourselves to those
less fortunate than us