Emotions within groups
Hierarchy and power differences are universal facets in social life.
Children and families arrange in social hierarchies.
Within 4-5 days of sharing a flat, students put themselves into hierarchies.
How do social hierarchies affect emotional life? What are the effects of having or non having power?
Sapolsky et al 2005
o In numerous Westernized societies, stepwise descent in socioeconomic status (SES) predicts increased risks of cardiovascular, respiratory, rheumatoid, and psychiatric diseases; low birth weight; infant mortality; and mortality from all causes. Young children from lower SES status are more anxious
o Animals of different ranks experience different patterns of stress
o A physical stressor is an external challenge to homeostasis. A psychosocial stressor is the anticipation, justified or not, that a challenge to homeostasis looms.
o Both types of stressor activate an array of endocrine and neural adaptations.
o Chronic psychosocial stressors (such as constant close proximity to an anxiety-provoking member of one’s own species) can increase the risk or exacerbate pre-existing diseases as hypertension, atherosclerosis, insulin-resistant diabetes, immune suppression, reproductive impairments, and affective disorders
Subordinates coping strategies – grooming, used to sooth when stressed. Horrible boss results in a closer community in the lower levels of power.
High rates of being subjected to stressors, low availability of social support and minimal presence of kin Increase of cortisol, size of adrenal glands and adrenaline and noradrenaline
If animal in low hierarchy is placed in another group and let rise in social hierarchy, there are radical changes in levels of stress and cortisol levels drop
Emotions within groups Rejection
Kross et al, 2011
• Rejections are the most common emotional wound we sustain in daily life.
• Our risk of rejection used to be limited by the size of our immediate social circle or dating pools.
• Today, thanks to electronic communications, social media platforms and dating apps, each of us is connected to thousands of people, any of whom might ignore our posts, chats, texts, or dating profiles, and leave us feeling rejected as a result.
• In addition to these kinds of minor rejections, we are still vulnerable to serious and more devastating rejections as well.
• Rejection always hurts, and it usually hurts more than we expect it to.
• Why are we so bothered by a good friend failing to “like” the family holiday picture we posted on Facebook? Why does it ruin our mood? Why would something so seemingly insignificant make us feel angry at our friend, moody, and bad about ourselves?
o Recalling a recent rejection activates areas involved in the processing of physical pain eliciting literal (albeit, emotional) pain.
Why is the brain wired this way?
o Being ostracized from our tribe was basically a death sentence.
o As a result, we developed an early warning mechanism to alert us when we were at danger of being “kicked off the island” by our tribe mates — and that was rejection.
o People who experienced rejection as more painful were more likely to change their behaviour, remain in the tribe, and pass along their genes.
• Unfortunately, the greatest damage rejection causes are usually self-inflicted. Indeed, our natural response to being dumped by a dating partner or getting picked last for a team is not just to lick our wounds but to become intensely self-critical.
The Evolutionary Function of Prejudice
McGregor, 1986
o Two trends of evolutions:
o Simplicity Complexity
o Uniformity Diversity
o The evolutionary process would be frustrated if every new biological or evolutionary experiment were to lose its novel and distinctive combination of genes by admixture with sibling populations, or by the reabsorption of divergent sibling populations into the parental stock.
o During the period in which emerging sub-species are evolving into separate species - so different from each other that they no longer have the biological ability to crossbreed their genetic identity must be protected from crossbreeding by some form of barrier, either geographical or psychological.
How does nature ensure genetic isolation?
1. Territoriality
2. Feral restraints: marked unwillingness to interbreed with members of other sub-species
♣ Built-in” constraints, based upon physical sign stimuli.
• Danger! a new biological experiment is in progress. Do not approach!”
♣ Acquired constraints
• Equated with the culturally-reinforced prejudices associated with “in-group” and “out- group” behaviour among human beings
The genetic advancement of man arose as a result of ongoing competition for survival between genetically different, non-interbreeding hominid populations
Neanderthals got extinguished – We had a mutation which meant that inhaling wood smoke from fire didn’t cause cancer. The Neanderthals couldn’t have fire
Competition was sustained by
o Geographical isolation
o Developing bonds of cooperation and love within the kindred, and of suspicion, fear, antagonism, and even warfare against such alien groups
Since then every member of every human group has experienced two different sets of reactions when dealing with others:
o Loyalty towards members of the in-group or syngenism (attachment and loyalty).
o Caution and competitiveness towards members of the out-group or ethnocentrism (suspicion of aliens)
Infrahumanisation: Tendency to dehumanise out groups to justify violence.
Elimination of moral emotions: Leave fear anger and disgust, we think the other group has them but we take away compassion, fairness.
We have a preferential tendency to think that our group is more likely to feel the emotions that really are more moral like embarrassment, shame, compassion
In and out group behaviour
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, 2016
o In our evolutionary past, individuals living in tight-knit groups needed ways of working out who was pulling their weight, and punishing those who did not.
o Today, we continue to make these value judgments using gut reactions normally based on a calculation of how much a person is willing to sacrifice for the overall good of the group (the so-called “welfare trade-off ratio”).
o Someone with a low welfare trade-off ratio, who gives little (or nothing) but takes a lot, immediately rings our brains’ alarm bells, telling us that they are not to be trusted (cheaters/evil)
o Clearly, keeping these people in our groups would have put us all in danger so they provoke the most potent emotional responses, such as disgust, fear and anger.
o Our reactions may be so strong that we may even feel justified in killing them to remove the threat from society.
o Are we more likely to remember the good or the bad done by people on our team?
o In the out-group, correctly identifying the behaviour of nice and nasty individuals stood at similarly high rates.
o But within the in-group, the individuals who stuck most in mind were the miscreants, those whose behaviour was uncooperative and harmful to others.
o When it comes to your team, what really sticks in the mind is infamy.
o We expect that the people around us will cooperate and go along with social norms, and any behaviour that violates our expectations is generally better remembered.
o And to ignore this has a great cost: in-group members tend to be the people we mix with, rely upon, and let our guard down around.
o An untrustworthy in-group member is like a broken stair in your building: you need to keep that fact in mind, or you’re going to sprain your ankle – or worse.
Heschler etal. 2016
o It is not so important to have the specifics of who in the out-group is bad because you’re not planning to be vulnerable to them anyway.
o If you had to guess about an out-group member’s character, you would be more likely to see them as uncooperative
o However, guesses about in-group members show a positivity bias: we are more likely to guess that a neutral in-group member is cooperative than uncooperative.
o Paradoxically, we have a general sense our team is more cooperative, even though we recall proportionately more instances of specific bad behaviour by group members.
Things to resolve intergroup conflict
o Joint projects
o Forgiveness
♣ Forgiveness is broadly understood as a process of decreasing inter-related negative resentment-based emotions, motivations, and cognition
♣ Forgiveness has two aspects:
• 1- Decisional forgiveness: a decision to control one’s behaviours
• 2- Emotional forgiveness
♣ Forgivingness is seen as a disposition, while forgiveness is seen as being related to a state response. Forgivingness—and more rarely forgiveness—has been found to be related to health
Forgiveness and fairness
Farrow et al, 2001
• Judgments about whether an act was forgivable and how empathic it was, involved a different portion of the cortex than judgments about fairness
• To forgive one must consider the other person, which stimulates empathy. To judge whether a decision is fair, though, does not necessarily bring in the human element and promote prosocial emotions.
• The left fronto-temporal region was most associated with both forgivability and empathy.
Pietrini etal. 2004
o fMRI: evoke a series of specific imaginary scenarios that comprised a hurtful event. Randomly instructed to forgive or not
o Amongst other areas, evocation of emotionally relevant hurtful events was associated with activation of areas involved in the regulation of emotional responses and perception and modulation of physical and moral pain
o During the hurtful condition females showed a greater activation of the anterior cingulate cortex: respond to physical and moral pain.
o These findings suggest that morally hurtful events likely elicit a stronger response in the areas of the brain that process the affective valence of painful stimuli in females than in males.
Ricciardi et al, 2013
o The anterior cingulate cortex was strongly engaged when subjects granted forgiveness;
o The degree of neural activation was correlated with the individual’s capability to grant forgiveness.
Because neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex is modulated by pain-killing drugs but also by hypnosis and placebo the authors propose that o forgivingess may represent a natural “self-aid medication mechanism” that was selected through evolution for people to overcome distressful situations before pharmacological agents or therapeutic interventions became available .
o Chronic stressful situations involve damaging processes - stress hormone secretion, neuronal loss and so on - for brain function and structure as well as for the whole organism. Therefore a mechanism that enables the individual to rapidly overcome such a situation confers a strong advantage for well-being and survival.
Emotion and cognition
- We live in a complex world, we act with purpose but we have limitations of resources and knowledge and our actions can produce results that we do not anticipate.
- Events occur for which we have no ready prepared response and when such events occur emotions signal them.
- They do not tell us exactly what to do but they prompt us, create an urge, a readiness to act in a way that on average during the course of evolution has been better than simply acting randomly or becoming lost in thought trying to calculate the best possible action.
Three concepts on the effects of emotions on cognitive functioning
1- Mood congruence perspective: applies to memories of emotions
o When an emotion is triggered (i.e: anger) not only the physiology happens, you think about sensations, past events of anger, people that make you angry, things that can happen in the future that make you angry, a whole network of semantic knowledge that becomes salient when you process information
o Anxiety or depression: when talk about the past they tend to only talk about the same emotions, they only retrieve past events associated to the state.
o If you ask a happy person to tell what happened in the past week they recall happy events.
2- Feelings of information: emotions themselves are informative when we make judgements. This accounts rests on two assumptions:
o Emotions provide us with a rapid signal triggered by something in our environment. I.e. anger signals that a state of injustice exists and this needs to be changed.
o Many of the judgements that we make are often too complex to review all the relevant evidence: we often were asked to make judgement that often are infinitively complex in a heuristic short cut fashion consult our feelings to give an indication of what the judgement is. if I ask you how the country is doing right now?
o So we consult our feelings and arrive to an heuristic judgement almost unconsciously.
3- Processing style: Different emotions promote different processing styles.
o Positive mood facilitates use of already existing knowledge structures, such as heuristics and stereotypes
o Negative moods, in particular sadness facilitates more analytical thought and careful attention to situational details
o If people feel sad they are less likely to rely on stereotypes than if they feel angry when they make social judgements of others
o Anger can make us more rational: angry people are less prone to the confirmation bias: tendency to seek out information that supports our existing view
Isen, 1987
o paricipants were made happy by watching a funny film, or were left neutral by watching a neutral film. Then were given a problem
o Neutral condition 20% or fewer found solution after 10 mins
o Happy condition 58-75 % or found solution after 10 mins. Happy mood enables imagination to explore further
o Positive mood makes you:
♣ Aim for higher goals
♣ Continue with what you are doing
♣ Resist change to some other state
♣ Generate more related words to one word
• Emotions affect cognitive functioning
Effects of moods and emotions on cognitive functioning
Emotions achieve their cognitive function by directing and biasing: ¥ Perception ¥ Attention ¥ Memories ¥ Thinking (judgment, persuasion)
Niedenthal and Setterlund, 1994
¥ Perceptual effects: Do mood and emotions influence events that we perceive?.
¥ We are more tuned to perceive things that are congruent with your moods
¥ Induction of happy or sad mood with classical music.
¥ Perform a lexical decision task: Strings of letters were flashed, some were words some not (letters that don’t appear in dictionary but can be pronounced in English like “blatkin”).
¥ Choose as quick as possible if the letters formed a word or a non-word
¥ Words were from 5 categories:
¥ Neutral unrelated: table, habit
¥ Positive unrelated: calm
¥ Negative unrelated: injury
¥ Positive related: delight
¥ Negative related: weep
¥ Happy mood identified happy words quicker.
¥ Sad mood identified sad words quicker.
¥ The effect did not extend to positive and negative words
MacLeod et al, 1986
¥ Attentional qualities of emotions: Emotions affect attention:
¥ The main research on effects of emotions and attention concerns anxiety.
¥ Emotion stimuli:
¥ Hold attention
¥ Grab attention
¥ Anxious subjects press the button quicker when the dot appears in the position of the threatening word. No difference with the neutral word.
Matthews and Klug, 1993
¥ Emotional stroop test: anxious people were slowed down in naming the print colours of word that relate to anxiety. The slowing of the colour naming is greatest with words that correspond to the subjects’ greatest anxiety
¥ Quickly name the color of the ink in which the word is written
¥ Emotion stimuli “grab” attention and interrupt main activity
¥ From the evolutionary point of view this narrowing of attention was useful, but they can get switched on permanently occupying people’s cognitive resources, making the world a frightening place, undermining confidence.
Yuille and Cutshall, 1986
¥ Emotions and memory: We are better able to recall past events if those events are emotionally arousing
¥ 13 witnesses to an armed robbery.
¥ Witnesses that had contact with the owner or thief rated themselves as very stressed by this event.
¥ Other less involved witnesses were not so stressed.
¥ Stressed witnesses remembered 93.7% of the details (police interview) and five months later researchers interview 88.2 %.
¥ Non so stressed 75% in both interviews
¥ Amygdala role in memory
Christianson et al, 1991
¥ Scene a – Neutral – remembered peripheral details
¥ Scene b – Unusual – same as neutral
¥ Scene c – Emotionally shocking – central details more
¥ People asked to recall details of the pictures
¥ Effects of emotions on thinking: Judgement
Effects on evaluative judgements: when in a positive emotional state, we evaluate objects and events in a more positive light.
¥ Effects on judgement of the future: Likeliness of something happening, happy englad will win, sad England will lose. Positive perspective on the future.
Judging likelihood of future events
Keltner et al 1993
o Asked angry or sad participants to estimate the likelihood of different events
o some caused by other people (a pilot error causes a friend to die in a plane crash)
o some caused by situational factors (icy roads cause a car accident).
o Angry people judged the negative life events caused by other people to be more likely than sad people who judged the events caused by situational factors to be more likely
o Anger leads people to blame others for various actions and to be acutely sensitive to unfair actions
o Sadness leads people to attribute events to impersonal situational causes
• Effects of emotions on thinking: Persuasion
o People are persuaded by stirring their emotions (Aristotle).
o People process arguments in two ways.
o 1- Systematic: the person carefully attends to the validity of the argument itself
2- Short-cuts: superficial, more careless, involves responses to less essential aspects of communication for instance, the personality or reputation of the person presenting the argument rather than to the validity of the argument itself. - Petty and Caccioppo 1986
Emotions and moral judgement
Are we born with a moral instinct?
Marc Hauser has gathered evidence that suggests we’re born with a moral instinct
• Near-universal principles
1. Most people think it is worse to deliberately cause someone harm in order to achieve a greater good, than it is to cause some harm as a side-effect in pursuit of the greater good.
2. Most people think actions that lead to harm are worse than omissions
3. Most people think harm delivered via direct physical contact - for example, pushing them to their death - is worse than harm delivered at a distance - for example, via a trap
Abarbanell and Hauser, 2010
o Rural Mayans (a society that doesn’t have contact with others):
♣ 1- Did not believe that harm caused by direct contact was worse than indirect harm
♣ 2- Did not think active harmful acts were morally worse than harmful acts of omission.
o Means and standard errors of the difference score (omission–action) for the less educated/more rural and more educated/less rural comparison groups from the regression analysis comparing all of the action–omission
• Apart from sympathy, people tend to think that emotions do not influence moral judgements,
• Chicken example – Buys a chicken, has sex with it and then eats it: does this person deserve to be punished or not?
o All the thoughts about freedom of rights and you arrive at this very unusual judgement where he can whatever he likes in his house. Beliefs in rights, freedom and personal privacy.
• Emotions give a gut feeling about the nature of transgression. Then the quick emotional reaction is replaced with slower thoughts, ethical principles that cultures develop
• Developmental psychology: Kids start as really emotional and immoral beings as we develop and have cognitive maturations and see other people’s perspectives on our actions that’s when we achieve the capacity to emit moral judgements
Emotions and moral judgement
Trolley dilemma (4 people working on the tack, Lever to change the track, but there is a man on the other track, if you pull it that man will die) = moral impersonal
Footbridge dilemma (4 workers in the path of the train, no lever, large man standing on water tower, if you push him off it will stop the train) = moral personal
Non moral: travel by bus or train given certain time restraints
Same ethical dilemma in both scenarios – first scenario is purely math, the second calls on emotional decisions – caught between competing drives
o Trolley dilemma: 90% of the people chose to divert the trolley and kill one person.
o Footbridge dilemma: 10% of the participants were willing to push the stranger. Why the difference? Emotional engagement affects people’s judgements
fMRI: in the footbridge problem activity in the brain areas associated with rational thought declined and activity in the emotional areas increased
In a follow-up experiment, they found that people who went against the “natural” tide had longer decision times than those who went with the tide.
o Trolley dilemma, those who sided with the 10% (do not throw the switch) delayed their choice.
o In the footbridge dilemma, those who sided with the 10% (push the person) delayed their choice. The researchers suggested that the delay occurred because cognition was needed to overcome the “natural” tendency.
Pascual et al, 2013
o In the trolley and switch the reasoning parts of the brain are activated.
o In the footbridge dilemma regions involved in pain and suffering (anterior cingulated cortex) are activated, this correlates to the decision
Greene et al, 2009 o Spatial proximity o Physical contact o Factors that prevent causation of harm ♣ Use of own muscular force ♣ Intention of causing harm
The person who deliberately attempts to kill an innocent, but fails, is judged as more evil than the person who accidentally kills an innocent
Nobes et al, 2009
o Children aged between three and eight years, as well as adults, were presented with short, illustrated stories in which intentions and outcomes were systematically varied, being either positive or negative.
o The stories involved bicycle crashes, dropped cups, and games of catch.
• 2- Both, children and adults are influenced by NEGLIGENCE. It moderated the extent to which participants based their actions solely on intention.
• When agents were careful, a high proportions of participants followed the intention-only rule.
• When agents were careless relatively few followed the intention rule because they also took negligence into account.
However, negligence had little impact on judgments when actions were ill-intentioned
Emotions, moral judgement and language
People who speak more than one language, often have the sense that they are a slightly different person in each of their languages: more assertive in English, more relaxed in French, more sentimental in Czech.
Is it possible that, along with these differences, the moral compass would point in somewhat different directions depending on the language used at the time?
Back to footbridge dilemma: what do you think would happen if I present the dilemma in a foreign language?
o The willingness to push the stranger increased from 20% to 50% in a foreign language (Spanish-English both ways)
Geipel et al, 2015
o Volunteers read descriptions of acts that appeared to harm no one, but that many people find morally reprehensible—for example, stories in which siblings enjoyed entirely consensual and safe sex, or someone cooked and ate his dog after it had been killed by a car.
o Those who read the stories in a foreign language (either English or Italian) judged these actions to be less wrong than those who read them in their native tongue.
o When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more deliberate mode simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language cues our cognitive system to prepare for strenuous activity (System 2)
o Native language can provoke visceral responses. Native Turkish speakers who had learned English late in life listen to words and phrases in both languages; some of these were neutral (table) whereas others were taboo (shit) or conveyed reprimands (Shame on you!). Their participants’ skin responses revealed heightened arousal for taboo words compared to neutral ones, especially when these were spoken in their native Turkish.
The neural correlates of everyday moral reasoning
Sommer et al 2010
o Everyday moral conflict situations in which a moral standard clashes with a personal desire.
o In such situations people have to decide between a morally guided and a hedonistic behaviour.
Moral conflicts (with no legal consequences) ♣ On the street I find a wallet with £ 50 in it but with no information about its owner. There is no possibility to find out who owns the wallet. However, I could turn in the wallet at the city's lost property office. ♣ What should I do? Turn in the wallet/Keep the wallet
Neutral conflicts
♣ I would like to renovate my flat. If I renovated the place myself I would have to spend £1500 . A professional painter in town who I also asked would charge £2000. What should I do? Do it myself/Have the painter renovate it
When compared to neutral conflicts, moral conflicts elicited higher activity in a wide spread neural network including the medial frontal cortex, the temporal cortex and the temporo-parietal junction and the posterior cingulate cortex.
o Further analyses of the moral conflicts revealed that hedonistic decisions in contrast to morally guided decisions were associated with significantly higher rankings of uncertainty and unpleasant emotions and induced significant more activation in the amygdala/parahippocampal region.
o Amygdala region plays a central role in the processing of negative emotional consequences associated with immoral decisions.
