Emotion (Ch 11) Flashcards
Types of affect
-term affect refers to a variety of emotional phenomena, including emotions, moods, and affective traits
Emotions
-briefs, acute changes in conscious experience and physiology that occur in response to a meaningful situation in the persons environment
Moods
- transient changes in affect that fluctuate throughout the day or over several days
- experience moods physiologically and psychologically
- last longer that emotions
Affective traits
- enduring aspects of our personalities that set the threshold for the occurrence of particular emotional states
- someone with the affective trait of hostility may react differently to being cut off in traffic than another individual
Basic emotions
- anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise
- reflect fundamental emotionally state that play a role in essential life tasks such as protecting one self and their loved ones from harm (fear) etc
- not single states, but rather groups of related emotions
Self-conscious emotions
- emotions that occur as a function of how well we live up to our expectations, the expectations of others, or the rules set by society
- include: shame, guilt, humiliation, embarrassment, and pride
- pride expression is universally recognized
Emotions and evolution
- evolved because they solved a particular problem in our ancestral past and contribute to reproductive success
- view of emotions as organized responses illustrates the adaptive value of negative emotions which enable people to respond efficiently to a significant challenge or obstacle
Broaden and build model
- positive emotions widen our cognitive perspective, making our thinking more expansive and enabling the acquisition of new skills
- help us to see the possibilities for new ways of responding to situations, which helps us build new skills
- studies show that positive emotions broaden ones focus
- when people are in positive moods they perform poorly on tasks of selective attention, but perform better on tasks that require broader attentional focus
Antecedent event
- a situation that may lead to an emotional response
- emotional response produces changes in physiology, behaviour and expressions, and subjective experience of the event
Appraisal
- an evaluation not a situation with respect to how relevant is it to one’s own welfare
- not always conscious
Emotion regulation
- cognitive and behavioural efforts people use to modify their emotions
- an example of emotion regulation that can occur early is reappraisal
- another kind is expressive suppression
Reappraisal
- when people re-evaluate their views of an event so that a different emotion results
- type of emotion regulation
Expressive-suppression
- another kind of emotion regulation
- when people want an unpleasant feeling to go away
- the deliberate attempt to inhibit the outward display of an emotion
Emotional response
- emerge from events appraised as relevant to one’s safety or personal goals
- include physiological, behavioural, and subjective changes
Physiological changes
- eg. Increased heart rate etc
- autonomic nervous system responsible for changes
- sympathetic activity activated for survival and protection
- positive emotions engage parasympathetic branch creating
Behavioural expressive changes
- emotions create expressive changes in the face and voice as well as behavioural tendencies toward particular types of action
- shops through facial and vocal intonation
Facial action coding system (FACS)
-coders score all observable muscular movements in the face
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Duchenne Smiles
- a smile that pulls up the lip corners diagonally and contracts the band of muscles that circles the eyes
- a genuine smile that expresses true enjoyment
Voice and emotion
-voice is very sensitive to emotional fluctuations because vocal chords are innervated by the autonomic nervous system
Subject experience of emotion
- the quality of our conscious experience during an emotional response
- subjective aspect of emotion draws on a persons experience of body changes as well as effects of emotion as have on cognition
James-Lange theory of emotion
- says that it is our perception of the physiological changes that accompany emotions that creates the subjective emotional experiences
- happiness: feeling warm/heart beat increase
- anger: heart beat faster/ feeling hot/ breathing changes
- sadness: lump in throat/feeling cold/breathing changes
- disgust: stomach sensations/goose flesh
- surprise: hear beat faster/feeling hot/breathing changes
- fear: heart beat faster/weak knees/ breathing changes
Cannon-Bard theory of emotion
- suggests that the subjective experience of emotion as well as the physiological changes in the body are parallel processes, mediated by two distinct neuronal pathways
- incoming sensory signals from emotional stimuli travel to thalamus and then relayed through descending pathways to body to regulate physiological changes, and through ascending cortical pathways to control subjective experience
Two-factory theory of emotion
- states that our conscious experience is determined by both an awareness of bodily arousal pared with a cognitive appraisal of the situation
- make a decision about which emotion we are experiencing based on the explanation that best fits the circumstances
Amygdala
- involved in appraisal of emotional significance of stimuli
- specialized function for noticing fear-relevant information
- people with damaged amygdalas have trouble recognizing untrustworthy faces and expressions of fear